Hi everyone!

I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. I'm Lydia and just started working for Wikimedia Germany. Some of you might know me from my work in Free Software projects.

I'll be a part of the team working on Wikidata (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata) - the goal of the project is to create something similar to Wiki Commons for data). It's a huge undertaking for the German and global community. Wikidata is a project I am passionate about and I am even more passionate about doing it right. Doing it right in this case obviously means making sure everyone's input is heard and taken into consideration. My responsibility will be exactly that - working with all of you to make it a successful project. A lot of things concerning how, when and where this will be used in Wikipedia are still up for discussion and decisions need to be found in the community. I will be here to facilitate this.

I assume many of you have not heard from me before so let me tell you a bit about myself. I studied computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. There I worked on a program to plan robot-assisted laser surgeries on human skulls and wrote my diploma thesis on collaborative and transparent Free Software development. I'm passionate about enabling people to make awesome happen around Free Culture. I've spent most of my spare time in the last 7 years on community work in KDE (http://kde.org). This includes running its mentoring programs, co-founding its community working group, serving on the board of the non-profit behind it and generally making sure everything is running smoothly. I've also helped out other projects occasionally like Kubuntu, VLC/VideoLan and openSUSE in that position. Not long ago I released a free book called Open Advice (http://open-advice.org) that is a collaborative effort to make it easier for people to start contributing to Free Software. You probably know 4 of the authors from around Wikipedia. When it comes to MediaWiki I have done developer engagement for Semantic MediaWiki Plus for the last two years and am on the steering committee of the non-profit behind Semantic MediaWiki. Due to my day only having 24 hours (even if some people claim otherwise) I have not had a chance to get into contributing to Wikipedia. Thankfully that's going to change now. (As a very regular user: Thank you!)

For the next days/weeks my focus will be: * collecting ideas/doubts/other input for Wikidata that you already have for me now (I'll work through any existing discussions I can find - if you want to make sure I see something please do send me a link.) * creating some resources to explain the project better * setting up some infrastructure to keep everyone updated on the status and able to contribute * work on collecting input in a structured manner and addressing it together

If you have any questions please let me know. I'll be around on the English and German Wikipedia, IRC, XMPP, Skype or whatever else you prefer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lydia_Pintscher_(WMDE) ). You can subscribe to the Wikidata mailing list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l and join the IRC channel #wikimedia-wikidata on freenode.

Cheers Lydia, who is really looking forward to working with you