Hello all,
I'm sorry to tell you that Naoko Komura, Wikimedia's Head of User
Experience Programs, has decided to leave the Wikimedia Foundation.
Naoko has just wrapped up the Stanton Wikipedia Usability Project for
us, so this is a natural moment for her to decide to leave. The
Wikipedia Usability Project is a major accomplishment, and one Naoko
should be deeply proud of.
As many of you know, last year, the Stanton Foundation generously
funded a project to improve Wikipedia's usability and user experience.
Naoko ran that project -- building the team from scratch, initially
working from a satellite office because we had run out of space. She
instituted project management and QA processes, user experience
research as part of the development cycle, regular reports and blog
updates, and so forth: it was the first project of this scale that the
Wikimedia Foundation had ever undertaken, and it required her to
create new processes for communicating and collaborating with
Wikimedia editors, and for assessing user acceptance. Naoko worked
long days and nights, and ensured that the project was successfully
completed.
Two weeks ago, the project resulted in English Wikipedia changing its
user experience significantly for the first time in many years. We are
confident that these and further upcoming changes will make Wikipedia
easier to contribute to for its millions of users. This historic
change is the direct result of Naoko's passionate commitment to see
the project through to success, and I am grateful to her.
I'm sad to see Naoko leave, but she's assured me that she will
continue to stay involved as a volunteer. She's also open to
discussing future project opportunities, and I'll certainly take her
up on that offer.
Naoko's last day with us will be June 17. Please join me in
thanking Naoko for her many contributions to the Wikimedia
movement.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Due to numerous requests we have extended the submission deadline for
Wikimania 2010 as follows:
* Abstract Registration: May 24, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time)
* Notification for workshops: May 29, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time)
* Notification for panels, tutorials, presentations: June 3, 11.59
p.m. (Pacific Time)
See the Call for Participation for more details:
http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/wiki/CFP
Thank you for helping make Wikimania 2010 a successful event. :-)
See you in Gdansk, July 9-11!
With best regards,
Wikimania Team
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
Greetings,
I'm very excited to welcome Ryan Kaldari to the Wikimedia Foundation as the Front End developer for fundraising. Ryan joins us from MTV Networks: Country Music Television, where he worked as a web developer responsible for several integration and architecture projects. Previous to that he helped develop Sitemason, an enterprise content management system used by numerous businesses, organizations, and colleges.
He's a long time Wikimedian who's been editing Wikipedia since 2004 and has been an admin since 2005. Some of you may have met him at the Paris Multimedia conference.
You can find what's kept him busy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kaldari
He'll be starting June 1st and will work in the San Francisco office.
Ryan will bring in some much needed skills and experience to our fundraising software developments. He'll help us catch up on a lot of our pending fundraising software development projects, develop new tools and improve general infrastructure and will bring more general awesomeness to the team. He'll also work extensivelyto support and improve CiviCRM as our fundraising database platform.
Please join me in welcoming Ryan to the Wikimedia team! We'll be setting up his email as his start day gets closer but until then, you can reach him at <kaldari(a)gmail.com>.
--
Tomasz Finc
Engineering Program Manger - Fundraising, Mobile, & Offline
> From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
> Date: May 17, 2010 10:23:36 AM PDT
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Chapter selected board seats - call for candidates, deadline extended
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> To whom it may concern,
>
> All nominations for candidates for the chapter selected board seats
> were supposed to be received by the end of today, however only three
> have been received. The chapters will be more likely to make a good
> selection if they have a large group of candidates to choose from,
> therefore I am extending the deadline for nominations by 10 days,
> until the 27th May. Subsequent stages of the process will be pushed
> back accordingly. Hopefully a decision will still be made in time for
> the board meeting at Wikimania, but this cannot be guaranteed.
>
> The original call for candidates, with the new deadline, is repeated
> below. Please help us get a large number of nominations by
> distributing this call as widely as possible on mailing lists, blogs
> and wikis.
>
> Can you, or someone you know, help guide Wikimedia Foundation through
> the next exciting steps of its strategic development and growth?
>
> The Wikimedia Chapters are looking for two candidates to sit on the
> Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees for 2 years commencing in
> July 2010. The new board members will be faced with the challenge of
> helping decide the future direction of the only top-10 internet
> property that is run by a non-profit organisation. The Wikimedia
> websites are constructed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers
> world-wide, supported by a small but growing number of staff and an
> international network of chapters.
>
> The successful candidates will most importantly be committed to the
> Wikimedia mission and willing to work with the various stakeholders of
> the Wikimedia movement, including the volunteers and the chapters that
> provide essential support for the movement. They will have the time to
> do this, with the appropriate communication skills (including a good
> standard of English) and ability to work as a team. They will also be
> able and willing to travel, and have an international attitude.
>
> The candidates will ideally be open-minded with experience of
> international affairs and governance techniques. They will have good
> communication skills, as well the ability to think strategically and
> to work independently as well as part of a team.
>
> The process that will be followed for this selection can be viewed
> here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/Process
>
> All nominations must be sent to the moderator (Thomas Dalton from
> Wikimedia UK) and deputy moderator (José Spierts from Wikimedia
> Nederlands) by 23:59 UTC 27th May. If you would like to nominate
> yourself or someone else, please see the instructions here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/Nominate
>
> The chapters wish to locate truly excellent board members and believe
> that can best be done if there are a large number of varied and
> quality candidates to consider. Therefore, the chapters ask that
> everyone that thinks they, or someone they know, would be a good board
> member submit a nomination. They also ask that this call for
> candidates be distributed as widely as possible on mailing lists,
> village pumps, blogs, etc..
>
> Best regards,
>
> Thomas Dalton,
> Moderator
Hi folks,
Over the next day or so you'll be seeing some exciting changes to the Wikipedia user interface as Vector rolls out across English Wikipedia.
In an earlier note on that topic, User Experience team project manager Naoko Komura mentioned another change - one that will bring some small improvements to the Wikipedia identity, namely the Wikipedia puzzle globe and the construction of the Wikipedia wordmark - the word and sentence underneath the puzzle globe.
The first major change you'll see is a slightly different looking Wikipedia puzzle globe. Over a year ago the Foundation began to recognize the need to have the puzzle globe logo improved slightly - mostly because we had some errors in the type characters featured in the puzzle globe, and also because we needed a better quality version that could print better and at a larger scale. We also needed to do that without dramatically changing one of the most recognized and beloved logos on the internet.
It seemed like an opportune moment to take our 2D globe, lovingly created by WP user:Nohat and improved/modified a cast of many other volunteers back in 2003, and take it to a truly 3D object. If we were going to undertake this process, we knew we would first need to populate the 'dark side of the puzzle globe' - and of course we turned to our volunteers to do just that.
Cary Bass worked with a team of volunteers to begin that process, and to revisit the many suggested and improvised fixes to the globe that have taken place over the years. Most of that discussion played out on a meta page here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Logo
The results are fantastic, and now you can see many new languages and scripts represented. The final state for our puzzle globe is quite similar to the original, fixes some errors, and has replaced the Klingon logo with an Amharic character.
The actual 3D construction of the new mark was carried out by a professional 3D animator, art director, and graphic designer, Philip Metschan, who is based in the SF Bay Area. Through his career Philip has worked for Industrial Light and Magic and Pixar, and currently he's also a visualization and concept artist for the DIRECT program (not surprisingly, it can be learned about on Wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIRECT).
We've created a new page on the Foundation wiki that talks about the revised 3D globe as well as the other improvements underway to the wordmark:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_official_marks/About_the_offi…
You'll notice that the new variation of the typeface uses Linux Libertine as an alternative to Hoeffler, the original typeface used to create the wordmark. In order to facilitate the creation of so many new variations of the Wikipedia identity it was important to find a viable alternative - Hoeffler is a commercial typeface that not every project would have access to, nor own. Linux Libertine is very close to Hoeffler in its shape and style, and for on-screen viewing is almost identical to Hoeffler.
The User Experience team also investigated another minor improvement: replacing the italicized "The Free Encyclopedia" with regular typeface. This ultimately resulted in improved on-screen readability, particularly in non-roman character sets.
Right now volunteers are working with the new localization guide to create the hundreds of new identities needed for each language variation of Wikipedia. You can see the Commons gallery filling up here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/2.0
If you're interested in supporting this effort you can simply follow the guide referenced on the page, or reach out to the Foundation's volunteer coordinator, Cary Bass, directly, cary(a)wikimedia.org.
It will take some time to create all of the marks, and initially the ops and User Experience team are rolling out the new identity on English Wikipedia and then focussing on other languages as soon as possible.
Hopefully the millions of dedicated users of Wikipedia will appreciate this minor improvement to the Wikipedia identity across all of the project languages. This is also a great new tool for chapter and volunteer representatives around the world - this scalable, crisper version of the new puzzle globe is easier to work with in a variety of situations, but retains the character and look of its predecessor. As with any important identity, I'm certain it will see further evolutions and improvements. We're open to hearing your thoughts and views for the next iteration.
Later today we'll also be posting this news to the Wikimedia blog, alongside updated news about the Vector roll-out, scheduled to unfold over the next 12 hours.
I'd like to thank again the dozens of volunteers who have worked over the last year+ to navigate the challenge of filling up this now 3D globe with new symbols and marks, and the countless others who have scrutinized the first drafts of the logo to suggest improvements (like proper orientation for characters). Cary Bass has been instrumental in mapping out all of these minor and major changes along with the volunteers, and the user experience team - particularly Parul, Naoko, Trevor, and Nimish, along with Hannes, should also be recognized for putting so much patience and dedication into this effort. Thanks as well to Philip Metschan for spending so much time and investing so much effort and detail into the design.
We also have to recognize the dozens of (and next dozen of) volunteers who will continue to localize the new identity in different languages, as well as the original efforts of user:nohat and those early pioneers who brought this identity to life in 2003. This enormous and truly unique design effort astounds me, and it's one of the most impressive examples of our collaborative capacity outside of the work of Wikipedia itself.
Thanks!
jay
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609, @jansonw
Wikimedia Foundation will engage academic experts and students to improve public policy information on Wikipedia
$1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to support first initiative of its kind for Wikipedia
SAN FRANCISCO May 11, 2010 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, today announced a new project designed to improve the quality of public policy-related articles on Wikipedia. It is the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project designed to systematically increase the quality of articles in a particular topic area.
The project will be funded via a $1.2 million grant from the US-based Stanton Foundation, a long-time funding partner of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Stanton Foundation is the beneficiary foundation created in the name of the US broadcasting industry leader and media innovator, Frank Stanton. Dr. Stanton's commitment to civic education and freedom of speech carries on through his philanthropic legacy, the Stanton Foundation.
"Wikipedia is a key informational resource for hundreds of millions of people," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "The Stanton Foundation wants to increase people's understanding of public policy-related issues, and supporting quality on Wikipedia is a great way to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is keen to experiment with techniques for encouraging subject-matter experts to work alongside our volunteers to improve quality. This funding will enable us to do that, and I am --as always-- very grateful to the Stanton Foundation for its support."
Wikipedia is written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world, and that won't change with this project. The Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement, and work to make them better. Some of that work will take the form of classroom assignments, and pilot activities will begin during the 2010 fall academic semester. The project will continue through summer 2011.
"I am excited to begin this work," said Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach at the Wikimedia Foundation. "There have already been professors around the world who assign their students to rewrite and improve Wikipedia articles: it's a proven model, and it benefits everyone. My hope is that this project will enable us to experiment and document best practices, so that academics and educational institutions worldwide can partner with us in helping Wikipedia to continually improve in quality and content."
About the Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 370 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property worldwide (March 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 15 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Press inquiries
Jay Walsh
WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org
(To UNSUBSCRIBE from this mailing list, please reply to this note with 'UNSUBSCRIBE' in the subject line)
Wikimedia Foundation Appoints Jing Wang and Mimi Ito to its Advisory Board
SAN FRANCISCO May 11, 2010 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, today announced the appointment of two new members to its Advisory Board, Mimi Ito and Jing Wang. Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist with a focus on new media use among young people. Jing Wang is an author and professor of Chinese cultural studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the chair of the International Advisory Board of Creative Commons China Mainland.
Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist examining children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications. She is an Associate Researcher with the University of California Humanities Research Institute with appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her research in Japan focuses on use of mobile technologies, and she has recently completed a multi-year project on digital kids and informal learning. She has authored and edited three books on kids' use of technology, and most recently, she has led a three-year collaborative ethnographic study, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, examining youth new media practices in the US, focused on gaming, digital media production, and Internet use. She has worked at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center, the Institute for Research on Learning, Xerox PARC, and Apple Computer. She has a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology, both from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
"Although we're seeing more and more examples of crowdsourced, non-commercial, and community produced media on the Internet today, Wikipedia continues to set the gold standard," said Mimi Ito. "At a time when so many of our past models of knowledge making and circulation are being challenged, Wikipedia provides proof of a sustainable and robust form of public media in the digital age. I'm delighted to be part of Wikimedia and the movement that it represents."
Jing Wang is an author and editor of seven books, Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at MIT and founder and organizer of MIT’s New Media Action Lab. She is also an affiliated faculty with MIT's Comparative Media Studies. In spring 2009, Professor Wang launched an NGO 2.0 project in collaboration with two Chinese universities, three Chinese NGOs, and three corporate partners including Ogilvy & Mather China and Frog Design. The project, funded by Ford Foundation in Beijing, is designed to enhance the digital literacy of grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China and will deliver an interactive platform complete with Web 2.0 training courses and a Chinese field guide to best practices and software of social media for nonprofits. Professor Wang started working with Creative Commmons in 2006 and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board of Creative Commons Mainland China. She also worked as the co-organizer of the Policy Culture Research Project with Anthony Saich at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
"I'm excited to join Wikimedia's Advisory Board," said Jing Wang. "The challenge of increasing the diversity of participation in regions such China can be difficult to navigate. The Foundation has radically impacted access to free knowledge for everyone in the world. I'm thrilled to volunteer my time to help create richer, higher-quality information resources by increasing the diversity of voices that contribute to the projects."
"I am thrilled to welcome both Jing and Mimi to the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board," said Michael Snow, Chair of the Board of Trustees. "Both Mimi and Jing are respected academics who will bring new expertise to us in their respective areas, and I look forward to them making a substantial contribution."
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the volunteer-written encyclopedia with a staff of just over 30 people, created its Advisory Board in January 2007 as a mechanism for input from leaders and thinkers in fields such as education, technology, and free culture. Advisory Board members convene with Wikimedia's leadership once a year at the annual Wikimania conference, and also support the organization in their specific areas of expertise.
The current Advisory Board membership includes:
Angela Beesley Starling (Co-founder, Wikia)
Ward Cunningham (Developer of the first wiki)
Melissa Hagemann (Open access and open education advocate, Open Society Institute/Soros foundations)
Mimi Ito (Cultural Anthropologist at University of California, Irvine)
Mitch Kapor (Founder/Co-founder Lotus Development, EFF, Mozilla Foundation)
Neeru Khosla (Co-founder, CK-12)
Teemu Leinonen (Professor, Media Lab, Aalto University)
Rebecca MacKinnon (Journalist; founder, Global Voices Online)
Wayne Mackintosh (Education specialist, Commonwealth of Learning)
Benjamin Mako Hill (Author, free software advocate)
Domas Mituzas Former Executive Secretary, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees; Database Engineer, Facebook)
Roger McNamee (Venture capital, musician)
Trevor Neilson (Partner, Global Philanthropy Group)
Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org)
Florence Nibart-Devouard (Former Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees; Consultant in Collaborative Media)
Achal Prabhala (Researcher and writer)
Clay Shirky (Associate Teacher, Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU)
Jing Wang (Professor, MIT; Founder MIT New Media Action Lab)
Ethan Zuckerman (Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School)
About the Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 370 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property worldwide (March 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 15 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement:
The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human
knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects
contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six
million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new
material continually being added.
The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the
projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to
some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural
sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the
sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is
illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the
grounds that it may offend.
Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend
to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that
already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially
offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or
informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no
such value.
--Michael Snow
Hello all,
I'm pleased to announce that Howie Fung, who has been supporting us as
a consultant since October 2009, is joining the Wikimedia Foundation
as Senior Product Manager. In the immediate future, Howie will
continue to support the deployment of our user experience
improvements, as well as the continuing development and deployment of
the FlaggedRevs extension for the English Wikipedia. In the longer
term, Howie will help us to build Wikimedia's product development
roadmap by commissioning and assessing research and analytics, and by
engaging in broad consultative processes.
Most recently, Howie was Senior Product Manager at Rhapsody,
where he helped grow the music site's traffic five-fold within the the
first year
on the basis of extensive customer research, including web analytics,
focus groups, user testing, and customer surveys. Prior to that, Howie
was Product Manager at eBay, prioritizing features based on business
objectives, usability studies, and economic impact. Howie has more
than 15 years of experience in product management, business analysis
and strategy, technology evaluation, and team incubation. He has an
MBA from The Anderson School at UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in
Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.
As a consultant, Howie completed several key projects, including the
survey of former contributors [1], the analysis of feedback from the
user experience beta [2], and extensive analysis of the user
interface, workflows and terminology used in the FlaggedRevs
extension. He has also supported Wikimedia's five-year business
planning process. We're very pleased that Howie is joining Wikimedia's
permanent staff: please join me in welcoming him!
All best,
Erik
[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results
[2] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beta_Feedback_Survey
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate