[Foundation-l] introduction (community communications for Wikidata)

[Lydia Pintscher]

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

-- 
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Community Communications for Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Eisenacher Straße 2
10777 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.

Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.