Wikimedia’s in-house tech staff has always been assisted by a fantastic volunteer infrastructure, from which most of us have been hired over the last few years. That relationship with our community also involves maintaining some important projects via contract positions…

Erik Zachte will be maintaining and improving our site statistics — integrating new page view counts and other valuable data in with the traditional edit stats he’s maintained for some time.

Aaron Schulz is working on Flagged Revisions, improvements to the CheckUser system, and many other tasks on editing and administrative workflow.

David McCabe is coming back to polish up his LiquidThreads project for us, a more flexible way to manage discussion pages which could be a big help especially for those large, ongoing forum-style pages like the Village Pumps.

We also get some great help from David Strauss who’s been getting our fundraising data integrated more solidly into a CiviCRM system, which is replacing the multiple different versions of custom-rolled fundraising databases we’ve gone through in the past.

Brion Vibber

Chief Technical Officer

It’s a great day to download Firefox 3 and edit your favorite wiki!

Earlier today a small consortium of wiki-developers, including our own Brion Vibber here at the Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Universal Edit Button.  With this little Firefox 3 extension users will be able to click one button, located conveniently in the Firefox address bar, to instantly access the ‘edit’ page for an increasing number of participating wikis, including Wikipedia.  A MediaWiki extension has been created so other wiki operators can implement the button into their own site.

At this time the button is exclusively available on FireFox (get help with the install), but there’s no reason we shouldn’t expect to see similar functionality in other browsers down the road.  Further proof that that the web is quickly shifting to become an ‘edit this page’ kind of place.  The power of public collaboration at work!

The Universal Edit Button was first discussed at the 2007 Recent Changes Camp, and again explored at the recent Recent Changes Camp in Palo Alto.  The button is a great example of the product of open-source collaboration and the mutual commitment of wiki developers to foster a community of interoperability and interconnectedness.

Here’s to the new age of the edit-powered web!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Greetings from Palo Alto, California!

Some folks from Wikimedia have joined the ranks of numerous wiki enthusiasts at this year’s Recent Changes Camp.  Big questions and conversations circulate…

Among dozens of great discussions and presentations, Ed Chi of PARC talked about some of their recent research on the users of Wikipedia, how they edit, and what that looks like - including the WikiDashboard.

Lots of photos on the Wikimedia Commons.

The camp continues tomorrow!  Still time to drop by. Thanks to Socialtext, Wikihow, Aboutus, WIkia, SolSeed.net, and Atlassian - and to all the volunteers who are making it happen.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Many, many people know that the software the powers Wikipedia is called MediaWiki, and it is in fact an open-source software that anyone can use. What is not known however, is that the Wikimedia Foundation is now also using open-source software for our telephone system. This last weekend, we rolled out our Asterisk 1.4 installation. Asterisk is an open-source software managed by Digium. By utilizing open-source software to power our telephone system, the Foundation is taking another step in the direction of free and open software use.

Rob Halsell, IT Manager & Systems Administrator

An international team of volunteers has translated the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia into more than 100 languages. This is a critical precondition to enable participation in Wikimedia projects from all parts of the world. Today, the work of translating the wiki software is done through a wiki: BetaWiki , which is not operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Free Culture Spotlight, a new blog feature that will focus on free culture and open source efforts external to the Wikimedia projects, takes a look at this extraordinary effort and the people behind it.

Wikipedias exist in more than 250 languages. From the very early beginnings of Wikipedia, the project was conceived to be multilingual. In March 2001, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced the first non-English Wikipedias. In his announcement, Jimmy wrote:

One problem is going to be technical support of these languages, since if there
are “fancy letter” problems, I will not know much how to deal with them. Japanese
is pretty much all “fancy letters”, but I assume that Linux/Apache/Perl will just
magically support it? Or will they be forced to use non-fancy ASCII urls?

Indeed, supporting content in other languages well is a very hard problem. Fortunately, increased standardization and awareness of internationalization problems has made it a little easier to at least deliver content to the end user. Try loading the Hebrew, Russian, Japanese or Hindi Wikipedia: On most modern systems, you should see the correct character sets. Note that it’s not just the content of the encyclopedia that is in a different language: The entire user interface is localized, and in right-to-left languages like Hebrew, even the navigation is optimized.
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