Hi all,
Please find below the text of an announcement that was just posted at
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/31/introducing-the-new-blog/ ;)
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Today we’re excited to announce the relaunch of the Wikimedia blog, with a
new design and new features intended to make it easier for people to
participate in sharing knowledge about the Wikimedia movement. We also hope
this relaunch serves as a very public reminder: today is always the day you
can–and should!–contribute a blog post.
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog/Drafts>
The Wikimedia Foundation blog was started in 2008
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/04/11/welcome/> as a place for staff of
the WMF to share their work. Early blog posts often focused on the work of
the Engineering team, including updates about the MediaWiki platform. News
from the technology team remains a significant portion of the content
shared on the blog today, but it has been joined by a riotous mix of
content from every corner of the Wikimedia world.
Over the past six years, the blog has evolved and taken on a character
closer to the movement of which it is a part. In April 2012, only 5 percent
of blog posts were from authors who were not employed by the Wikimedia
Foundation. Today community-authored posts often make up more than half of
the total posts in a given month. The blog has become a platform for the
movement, with more contributors, more languages, and increasingly diverse
subjects and geographies. The volume of posts has grown tremendously: we
frequently publish two or more posts a day. We long ago stopped referring
to it as the Foundation blog — instead, it is a blog for the entire
Wikimedia movement.
Today’s relaunch is designed to reflect some of these changes. We’ve
dropped the word Foundation from the blog’s logo: visually, it is now the
Wikimedia blog. The design changes offer more space to highlight stories
and updates from across the movement, as well as different types of
content. (For example, the big, beautiful images from initiatives like Wiki
Loves Monument and Wiki Loves Earth will be right at home here.) Blog posts
that attract lots of comments and discussion will be automatically featured
on the homepage, making it easier to see what people are talking about.
Posts in languages other than English will be easier to find and read,
offering more opportunities to engage with other language communities.
Some other notable updates include:
- Direct comment publishing with no moderator delay, thanks to a custom
privacy-friendly captcha solution.
- A responsive design that works better on varying screen sizes: Catch
up with the movement as you commute.
- The code for the theme will be released on Github: We’re looking
forward to your pull request for bug fixes.
- Easier and faster updates thanks to dedicated tech support.
- An admin tool for simple transfer of licensing information for images
from Wikimedia Commons, to easily and correctly attribute the work of
community members.
- Enabling multi-author bylines, reflecting the collaborative production
process of many posts (such as this one)
With all these changes, it’s still a work in progress. In the year since we
embarked on a redesign process (implemented by Exygy <http://exygy.com/>, a
San Francisco software firm) we have continued to learn about how the
community uses the blog; there are additional tweaks we may add to the look
and feel in the future. We’re still working on how to best categorize posts
in a way that works for longtime community members, as well as people new
to the movement. In the spirit of Cunningham’s Law
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law>, we thought we’d start
with Movement, Technology, Events, and Foundation as the main navigation
categories, and learn from the feedback about how they work for readers.
You will probably find other features you’d like to nominate for continued
evolution. Please do. (And point out any bugs in the comments… we’re still
finding some.)
In planning this relaunch, we had extensive conversations with members of
the WMF Operations and Engineering teams about whether we should continue
to host the blog on our servers, or move to a third-party host. We
reconfirmed that the mission of the Operations team is to operate one the
world’s most popular websites. Rather than staff up to support the blog, we
jointly concluded that it made sense to work with a third-party host,
Automattic, that has particular expertise in this area and understands our
needs and values, including a commitment to free software. They have been a
strong partner, working to meet our privacy standards, disabling some of
their standard analytics tools and clarifying how they handle certain
information. They have also altered their WordPress VIP Terms of Service
<http://vip.wordpress.com/hosting-tos/> to accommodate Creative Commons
licenses.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s taken the care and attention of many people to
seamlessly move so much movement history from one platform to another. We’d
like to thank the many members of the community who have been–and no doubt
will be–providing suggestions and bug reports for the blog platform (with a
special thanks to Jeremy Baron). A very big thanks to former WMF
Communications team member Matthew Roth, who spearheaded this process and
led the redesign work in 2013; to Terry Chay, who provided invaluable
technical advice on the process; to the WMF Legal, UX and Operations teams,
in particular Luis Villa and Rob Halsell; and to the teams at Exygy (in
particular Justin Carboneau and Zach Berke) and at Automattic.
A final reminder: Like the Wikimedia projects, the blog is created by you.
You can draft posts directly on Meta, and the Communications team will work
with you to edit and publish, according to a transparent editorial process:
it’s now common for posts to be created in full view of anyone who is
inclined to read or participate. This blog is a platform for the movement,
and we’re here to help you share your message
<http://vip.wordpress.com/hosting-tos/> with the world.
*The WMF Communications Team*
*Katherine, Tilman, Carlos, and Heather*
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB