Good news for Wikisource Community. Cheers!!

Jayanta

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Bodhisattwa Mandal < bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Sam,

Congratulations for joining the community tech team.

And also many many thanks for what all you have done for the OCR issue of Indic Wikisource communities. It's because of amazing people like you, Kaldari and Shrinivasan, the crisis is almost over and the projects have got the much-needed momentum.

Best wishes, Bodhisattwa On Sep 16, 2016 12:53 PM, "Thomas Tanon" thomaspt@hotmail.fr wrote:

...

Hello Sam,

Congratulations! That's amazing! I really hope you will be able to keep making the Wikisource tech backlog lower [1].

Congrats again,

Thomas

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikisource/

...

Le 16 sept. 2016 à 05:23, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au a écrit :

Hi all,

I've recently started working on the Community Tech team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech at the Wikimedia Foundation. So I just wanted to say hi and that I'm really excited to be able to work on Wikimedia code full-time! :-)

Community Tech is all about helping build tools that support contributors, and basically takes its work-list from the annual Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on a tool to bring better OCR to indic-language Wikisources, via Google's Cloud Vision API: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Google_OCR

I'm not at all exclusively working on Wiksource stuff of course, not by a long shot. But that's still where my personal interest lies, and so if anyone's got any ideas about future software development that we need then I'm keen to help if I can. And this year's Wishlist Survey will be happening before too long, so get ready to list stuff there!

Lastly, please be gentle with me as I try to figure out how to shift to life not-as-a-volunteer! (Although I'm still a volunteer too.) I'm trying very hard to be transparent and professional and not blur the various roles.... gets confusing though! :-)

Thanks, Sam.

-- [[User:Samwilson]] [[User:SWilson (WMF)]]

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Yes, I hope so too!! :-)

Maybe we should create a column on the Wikisource board on which to put wishlist items? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1117/

Oh, and for anyone who missed it, there's a great interview with tpt here: https://blog.wikimedia.de/2016/09/08/i-dont-have-to-find-tasks-tasks-are-com...

On Fri, 16 Sep 2016, at 03:22 PM, Thomas Tanon wrote:

Hello Sam,

Congratulations! That's amazing! I really hope you will be able to keep making the Wikisource tech backlog lower [1].

Congrats again,

Thomas

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikisource/

...

Le 16 sept. 2016 à 05:23, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au a écrit :

Hi all,

I've recently started working on the Community Tech team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech at the Wikimedia Foundation. So I just wanted to say hi and that I'm really excited to be able to work on Wikimedia code full-time! :-)

Community Tech is all about helping build tools that support contributors, and basically takes its work-list from the annual Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on a tool to bring better OCR to indic-language Wikisources, via Google's Cloud Vision API: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Google_OCR

I'm not at all exclusively working on Wiksource stuff of course, not by a long shot. But that's still where my personal interest lies, and so if anyone's got any ideas about future software development that we need then I'm keen to help if I can. And this year's Wishlist Survey will be happening before too long, so get ready to list stuff there!

Lastly, please be gentle with me as I try to figure out how to shift to life not-as-a-volunteer! (Although I'm still a volunteer too.) I'm trying very hard to be transparent and professional and not blur the various roles.... gets confusing though! :-)

Thanks, Sam.

-- [[User:Samwilson]] [[User:SWilson (WMF)]]

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I am very grateful to Aubrey!! :-)

Although, Aubrey, I think you have the wrong word there! ;-) Surely I must not "pretend" but to actually and properly seek feedback?! ;-)

Which indeed, we shall all do I think.

So, how best to do that? Wikisource communities are small, but I think we're actually more united in some ways than in other projects. But I still think there's a fair bit of dispersion of conversations — I think most people know about their local Scriptorium (or Bar, Cafe, Warung kopi, or Тековни настани as the case may be), but there are lots of contributors who aren't on this mailing list, or don't know about Phabricator, or don't use IRC.

This issue is pertinent: T144074 Improve the representation of Wikimedia communities beyond English Wikipedia in the Community Wishlist Survey 2016[1]

So, anyway, thank you everyone for your welcomes. I just hope I can live up to it all. :-)

Thanks, Sam.

On Mon, 19 Sep 2016, at 09:03 PM, Andrea Zanni wrote:

This is *fantastic* news! I'm really happy for Sam and I think this will bring a lot of good things for our community.

Of course I don't want to take any credit, but I think it's important to remember that:

• I talked with Ryan Kaldari and Danny Horn (of Community Tech) a lot in Berlin. Johann (also CT) was in Wien e we all met him:
• they told me they were in need of another person in the team, and would have liked a Wikisource person too
• they were very impressed by the response that came from Wikisource community during the Community Survey

In the end, all this advocacy and commitment from the community (plus the crucial fact that Sam is awesome) paid off: I think we should all be proud of this.

Having a person like Sam inside the WMF is special and crucial. He will not of course work just for Wikisource, but we have a real chance, as a community, to have a fruitful and rich conversation and communication between the community and the team, and we must not waste that.

Sam ***must pretend*** a thorough feedback from us as a community, when he works on Wikisource stuff. We can collaborate to put our requests and feedbacks in the right places, and make sure that crucial problems are heard by the "top". So, it's a lot of work from us :-) We really need to to waste this opportunity.

Aubrey

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 4:22 AM, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au wrote:

...

Yes, I hope so too!! :-)

Maybe we should create a column on the Wikisource board on which to put wishlist items? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1117/

Oh, and for anyone who missed it, there's a great interview with tpt here: https://blog.wikimedia.de/2016/09/08/i-dont-have-to-find-tasks-tasks-are-com...

On Fri, 16 Sep 2016, at 03:22 PM, Thomas Tanon wrote:

...

Hello Sam,

Congratulations! That's amazing! I really hope you will be able to keep making the Wikisource tech backlog lower [1].

Congrats again,

Thomas

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikisource/

...

Le 16 sept. 2016 à 05:23, Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au a écrit :

Hi all,

I've recently started working on the Community Tech team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech at the Wikimedia Foundation. So I just wanted to say hi and that I'm really excited to be able to work on Wikimedia code full-time! :-)

Community Tech is all about helping build tools that support contributors, and basically takes its work-list from the annual Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on a tool to bring better OCR to indic-language Wikisources, via Google's Cloud Vision API: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Google_OCR

I'm not at all exclusively working on Wiksource stuff of course, not by a long shot. But that's still where my personal interest lies, and so if anyone's got any ideas about future software development that we need then I'm keen to help if I can. And this year's Wishlist Survey will be happening before too long, so get ready to list stuff there!

Lastly, please be gentle with me as I try to figure out how to shift to life not-as-a-volunteer! (Although I'm still a volunteer too.) I'm trying very hard to be transparent and professional and not blur the various roles.... gets confusing though! :-)

Thanks, Sam.

-- [[User:Samwilson]] [[User:SWilson (WMF)]]

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Links:

1. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T144074

Congrats Sam.

On Tue, 20 Sep 2016 07:49 manoj k, manojkmohanme03107@gmail.com wrote:

Great step for WS Community

On 16 Sep 2016 08:53, "Sam Wilson" sam@samwilson.id.au wrote:

...

Hi all,

I've recently started working on the Community Tech team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech at the Wikimedia Foundation. So I just wanted to say hi and that I'm really excited to be able to work on Wikimedia code full-time! :-)

Community Tech is all about helping build tools that support contributors, and basically takes its work-list from the annual Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on a tool to bring better OCR to indic-language Wikisources, via Google's Cloud Vision API: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Google_OCR

I'm not at all exclusively working on Wiksource stuff of course, not by a long shot. But that's still where my personal interest lies, and so if anyone's got any ideas about future software development that we need then I'm keen to help if I can. And this year's Wishlist Survey will be happening before too long, so get ready to list stuff there!

Lastly, please be gentle with me as I try to figure out how to shift to life not-as-a-volunteer! (Although I'm still a volunteer too.) I'm trying very hard to be transparent and professional and not blur the various roles.... gets confusing though! :-)

Thanks, Sam.

-- [[User:Samwilson]] [[User:SWilson (WMF)]]

---

Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

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