Hi all,

I wanted to give our New York City Wikimedians a heads up for the following event, Wikis Take Manhattan, a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and StreetsWiki articles covering sites and street features in Manhattan and across the five boroughs of New York City. The event is based on last year’s hugely successful Wikipedia Takes Manhattan, and the event organizers have evolved it to include StreetsWiki this year.

Participants begin the hunt from one of two locations: Columbia University (at the sundial on college walk) and one at The Open Planning Project’s West Village office:

349 W. 12th St. #3
Between Greenwich & Washington Streets
By the 14th St./8th Ave. ACE/L stop

Cary Bass,
Volunteer Coordinator

Update!: Interested parties can join the Wikimedia NYC email list at Wikimedia NYC.

Most people are aware that every single page on Wikipedia (or every Wikimedia wiki, for that matter) has a visible history tab.  With one click you can see every single edit made to that page from its creation, including the names of the registered or anonymous user who made the edit.

With a few more clicks to the ‘cur’ or ‘last’ links on the left side of the history pile you can view how the current version of the page differs from historical versions, in essence seeing how the page has evolved (there’s a great diagram of what all the fields mean in Wikipedia’s help section).

But there’s a new kid in town.  Somewhat subtly featured above the list of edits are two links to ‘revision history statistics’ and ‘revision history search.’

For demonstration purposes you can find ‘revision history statistics’ for today’s featured article on author Chinua Achebe here and the actual page it links to here.

The revision history statistics tool was built by User:Aka, from the German Wikipedia. In one complete page you’ll get a snapshot of interesting statistical information about the page: when it was created, how many edits since creation, all the users who have made edits, and the number of edits for any given month of the page’s existence.

Revision history search (aka WikiBlame) is another tool now accessible via the history page.  Created by another German Wikipedian, User:Flominator, WikiBlame allows readers to search article histories against username and other criteria, primarily to ensure accurate use of copyright.

As Erik Zachte (creator of the wonderful Wikipedia Statistics page and contractor with the Wikimedia Foundation) points out on his newly created blog, there are some interesting trends to examine in the histories of recent high-profile articles.

Combined or separately, these tools provide us a window to the incredible stories that can be told through an article’s history.  In time, and in concert with our community of volunteer statistics enthusiasts and technicians, we plan to bring even more tools and approaches to sifting through edits and histories of Wikipedia content.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Happy Birthday to the GNU project, which turned 25 today and is celebrating with a video of English humorist Stephen Fry. In September 1983, Richard Stallman first announced the plan to develop a free software operating system called GNU. Today, in combination with the Linux kernel, GNU/Linux is a completely free operating system running on many millions of computers world-wide. You are using GNU/Linux every day when surfing the web, as it’s one of the most popular operating systems to power web servers, database servers, and the other infrastructure that makes the web work.

As a desktop operating system, GNU/Linux is also making inroads. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we use free software developed by the GNU projects and other communities for servers and clients. For example, we use the Apache web server, the MySQL database server, the Squid proxy server, the PHP scripting language, and the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution on our servers. But even our phone systems are built on top of free software, and we use important open standards like Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis on Wikipedia. For day-to-day office work, we use the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird e-mail client, OpenOffice.org for word processing and presentations, and so on. An increasing number of staff members are also using Ubuntu GNU/Linux as a desktop operating system (including Sue Gardner, the Executive Director).

And, of course, Wikipedia itself is given away under legal code developed by the GNU project: the GNU Free Documentation License. So, we owe an enormous debt to the GNU project and to the Free Software Foundation, as pioneers and leaders of a movement for sharing code freely, so that it cannot be used to coerce and restrict users, and so that it can be improved upon by others. That idea is one of the key inspirations for Wikipedia itself.

Happy birthday, GNU!

Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation