Today we are very pleased to announce the kick-off for the 2008 Annual Giving Campaign for the Wikimedia Foundation. For most Wikipedia users that means you’re now seeing a shiny banner at the top of every Wikipedia page - likewise for the other Wikimedia Foundation projects.

The campaign will run through January 15, 2009 - which will mark the eight birthday of Wikipedia. We’ve increased our goal this year to $6million USD - it’s ambitious, but with more resources to spread the word and help bring in donations, we’re confident we’ll get there and beyond.

To make things run smoothly we’ve rebuilt the entire front-end of the donation system at donate.wikimedia.org, and we’ve streamlined the Wikipedia donation banners. Live comments from donors return, and we’ve also added a series of standard ‘Support Wikipedia’ buttons. We’re also encouraging fans and users to remix the Wikipedia puzzle mark to show support in their own way.

For the podcasters or internet/traditional radio folks out there we’ve also produced a series of audio public service announcements in varying lengths, and in broadcast quality formats.

Last (but not least) we’ve created a form so anyone can share their stories about how Wikipedia has made their lives easier. This is the perfect time to reflect on the impact Wikipedia has had on your life - and you’ll help us build our understanding of how Wikipedia is being used by people every day. We’ll be sharing your stories here on the blog.

A huge thank-you to our ongoing and new donors - your donation will support global access to free knowledge, and a long, healthy future for Wikipedia.

Here’s to a successful campaign!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

In December 2007, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation formally decided to ask the Free Software Foundation, which administers the GNU Free Documentation License under which Wikipedia is distributed, to release a new version of the license which will allow Wikimedia to switch its content to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA). The underlying motivation of this change is that CC-BY-SA is an easier-to-use license granting the same essential freedoms as the GFDL. It is also more widely used by other educational projects, and switching the license would allow Wikimedia wikis to freely share content with those projects.

We’re very pleased that the Free Software Foundation has today released version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License which implements this requested change. Next, the Wikimedia Foundation will organize a community wide referendum to decide whether existing GFDL wikis should be made availabe under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license.

We are deeply grateful to the Free Software Foundation for making this change. I’ve posted a more in-depth summary of what it means on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, and an energetic discussion on the topic has already begun. We will post more details on this topic soon.

See also:

Erik Möller
Deputy Director

In collaboration with the the Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-MERIT (www.merit.unu.edu), we want to invite you to take the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors. For the
first time, this survey will provide an overview of the Wikipedia community and how the content of Wikipedia is created, used, and perceived. We therefore encourage everyone to participate in this
survey and to fill in an online questionnaire that will be made accessible to you in the coming two weeks. We have prepared survey versions in more than 20 languages. In order to keep the traffic
manageable we have chosen a staggered approach for the surveys.

The survey is currently running in Dutch, Vietnamese, and Tamil, and we have received more than 2500 complete responses already. (We can track the responses by language, so we can choose to examine any subset we want.)

The following language versions will be launched in the coming days: Russian, Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Greek, Esperanto, Czech, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Afrikaans, Indonesian, French, Thai,
Spanish, German, English, Chinese-simplified and Chinese-traditional.

The survey will be featured in the site-wide announcement banners of those languages.

I want to extend a BIG thank you to all the volunteers who have worked on this survey, especially all the translators. We will compile translation credits for the press release when the survey is
completed.  Thanks also to the UNU-Merit team (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Rüdiger Glott, Herman Pijpers, Jan Philipp Schmidt), and to Naoko Komura, who has been project managing the survey since September. And, thanks to all colleagues who have given feedback along the way.

We’ve tried to design questions that make sense. Please feel free to send any and all feedback to info(at)wikipediastudy(dot)org.

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.

Haisan Station, the three millionth image, uploaded by Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

It’s always a pleasure watching when projects of the Wikimedia Foundation reach milestones.  Three of Wikimedia’s projects have now achieved new and wonderful numbers.

The Hungarian Wikipedia, celebrated 5 years on 8 July 2008 with its 100,000 article, Erdődi Simon, an entry about a Catholic Bishop in the medieval times.  This makes the Hungarian project the 21st Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles.

The Japanese Wikipedia has also achieved a remarkable milestone by being host to 500,000 articles, on June 25, 2008, with one of the following articles: フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford)ã€â€Žå›½éš›ãƒãƒ£ãƒ¬ãƒ³ã‚¸ãƒ‡ãƒ¼ (International Challenge Day)ã€â€Žã‚¦ã‚¨ã‚¹ãƒˆãƒãƒ¼ã‚¸ãƒ‹ã‚¢ã®æ°´é‹ (West Virginia Waterways)ã€å—阿蘇鉄é“MT-2000形気動車 (Motorized Rail MT-2000), articles which were created at the same moment the project achieved the milestone.  This adds Japanese to the list of 5 Wikipedias with over half a million articles (the other four are English, German, French and Polish).

I’m especially pleased to announce that Wikimedia Commons has uploaded 3 million files, as of July 16, 2008.  The three-millionth file is a photo of a subway station in Taipei, uploaded by Singapore Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, especially interesting as the millionth file uploaded in November 2006 was also a Wikimedian in Singapore, Terence Ong.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator

Kaltura, who Wikimedia has been working with over the last few months on the exploration of open-source, collaborative video editing on Wikimedia projects, have developed a Wikimania video wiki leading up to this year’s conference in Alexandria. Kaltura is also a generous benefactor of Wikimania this year, providing financial support to make the event possible.

They’re inviting project volunteers and enthusiasts (whether attending or not) to try their hand at collaborative video uploading/editing/improving.  Share your video from your travel to Egypt - or if you can’t make it, why not edit in your comments or questions for participants?

Invitation from Lisa Bennet, Director of Public Relations and Marketing, Kaltura

—

Hi Everyone,

As Wikimania is right around the corner, we’ve added a new great way to share information about the event. I would like to invite you to the Wikimania Video Site where you can create collaborative videos. The site already has some videos where people can add their expectations for the event or share why they can’t join us this year, and there will be computer stations at Wikimania for attendees to add videos and pictures in real-time from Alexandria. Hopefully, it will be a great resource for people that could not be there in person to see the highlights, and for the attendees to document the event.

Check it out at: http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Wikimania_Video_Site

The site is hosted on the Kaltura devwiki and uses the collaborative video technology from Kaltura, which the Foundation partnered with late last year to explore adding videos to Wikipedia and other projects.

You’re invited to share your experiences from Wikimania, play with the technology, and provide your feedback.

Wikimania is an annual conference put together by a team of local volunteers for Wikimedians around the globe.  The original conference, hosted in Frankfurt in August 2005, was put together as an opportunity for members of the growing communities to meet and talk with each other and those involved in wiki software development.

This year’s Wikimania is being held in Alexandria, Egypt, in the prestigious Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  The venue chosen was built both as a tribute to the Library of Alexandria of antiquity and as a center of knowledge and learning, which nicely compliments the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.   The event, featuring a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops from wide ranging topics of interest to Wikimedians, educators, the free-culture community at large, tech geeks, and the public at large, runs from Thursday, July 17 and continues to Saturday, July 19, 2008.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator

The voting in the 2008 elections for the Board of Trustees is currently being held through June 22.  This summer’s election is to fill the seat currently held by Board Chairperson Florence Devouard.   This is the first Trustee election to take place under the Board restructuring approved by the board in April 2008.

Why are we having board elections?  The Wikimedia Foundation is a unique entity in the fact that our projects are managed by a great number of people around the world, volunteers who create and edit the content on the Wikipedia sites and our other projects like Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons.  The volunteers are members of related project communities from which members have agglomerated to form a meta-community of individuals interested in the Wikimedia Foundation and having a voice to participate in determining how Wikimedia fulfill its mission both short-term and in the years to come.

Who is eligible to vote?  The 2008 Board Election Committee has provided guidelines as to which members of the community are eligible to vote in the election.  It effectively covers anyone who is presently active on at least one Wikimedia project, has a history with some edit contributions.

Is Florence Devouard running again?  It saddens me to say that Florence has chosen to pursue other endeavors in lieu of returning to her position as Chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Florence has overseen the board during a period of rapid growth and maturity of the Wikimedia Foundation and left a legacy that will be difficult for subsequent board to follow.

Is the candidate running for board chairperson?  Although Florence is vacating the position, the election is only for a board seat.  The board then determines among them who they want to perform the duties of Chair.

Who is running for office?  Candidate presentations are located here.  Each candidate for board has provided personal details and a statement as to how they believe they can benefit the Wikimedia Foundation.  There is also a question and answer section where community members have asked candidates a number of questions pertaining to how they see their roles as board members.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator

Quite a bit of discussion lately on planet wikimedia (a lovely aggregator of dozens of wiki-focussed blogs) about something called SUL - that’s Single User Login if you’re not the sort of person who doesn’t find yourself logging into a Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, or similar Wikimedia project account.

Although any human on the planet can edit a Wikimedia project without an account, the majority of editors take advantage of user accounts on all of the projects to keep track of their edits, share background about their interests, and to communicate with other Wikimedia volunteers. On English Wikipedia alone there are over 7,000,000 separate registered user accounts.

And although lots of editors spend the majority of their time in one project, say Wikipedia, there are thousands of other editors who dabble in other Wikimedia projects several public and internal planning wikis.

Obviously this presents one unfortunate problem - a dozen separate user accounts on each project. Hence, SUL! Project volunteers can now follow a process that migrates all of their individual accounts into one master account for all the projects. new volunteers will be able to take advantage of this as well, using one unique username and password for all of their cross-project work.

Volunteer developers and staff developers began rolling the system out over the last few months for select users, and as of today it’s open to anyone and everyone with multiple accounts across the projects.

Although this might not have a dramatic impact on your own wiki experience, rest-assured that it will ultimately make the lives of all our multi-project editors much, much easier. Bravo to the team for a job well done.

Get hooked up with SUL here - follow the discussion and check out what others are saying as well.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

It should come as no shock to a reader of any of the Wikimedia projects that volunteers are chronic inter-communicators. Whether it’s on any of the millions of article discussion pages, or via Wikimedia’s dozens of contributor-maintained email lists, conversation and communication is central to the success of the projects.

But among that mix, you may not be aware of four projects that contributors have been working on for a number of years.

One is Wikizine, an independent, internal news bulletin which has been around since late 2005. Wikizine, under the confident helming of long-term volunteer Walter, provides a Wikimedia wide view of new technologies, challenges, and editorial observations from the projects. Other volunteers are welcome to contribute, and it’s also routinely translated into German and Spanish.

The Wikipedia Signpost, which started in 2005, is decidedly Wikipedia focussed, hence its name. Founded by one of our current board members, the Signpost, like all of Wikimedia’s projects, is 100% volunteer driven. Regular WP users can insert scripts into their user page, or on any relevant page to have the Signpost delivered right to their door. Aside from diving into WP related stories, there’s also WikiWorld, a regular comic strip, featured media, and reports of ongoing wiki dispute resolution and arbitration.

If audio is more your flavor, also consider subscribing to the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, or the aptly named sister project, Not-The-Wikipedia-Weekly podcasts. Two well-programmed approaches to user-generated discussions.

Beyond that there are dozens, if not hundreds of further discussions about the projects both in-wiki and in other off-line formats. Add a comment with your links and additions to this not exhaustive list.

J. Walsh
Head of Communications