Wikimedia Commons is the multimedia repository used by all Wikimedia Foundation projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and so on). With more than 2.8 million freely licensed photographs, sounds, and videos it is a treasure trove of rich media. The global Wikimedia community goes to great lengths to find high quality multimedia content and to release it freely: Wikimedians organize trips to foreign countries to take photos, they attend events to shoot celebrities, they spend hours restoring historical pictures. A new project, the “Valued Images” selection, seeks to identify the most valuable image contributions to the project. In doing so, it recognizes that taking a reasonable photo of an elusive celebrity can be just as much work as producing a fantastic panorama.

When browsing Wikipedia, we may often take for granted that so many articles include photographs and high quality illustrations. But just like the text, much of the multimedia in our projects is the result of the passionate dedication of our contributors. Identifying the most valued images in Wikimedia Commons is a good way to honor these contributions.

Erik Möller, Deputy Director

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

Wikipedia fans and Google maps users may have heard recently that Google has unveiled a handsome new feature for its ubiquitous mapping system.

Alongside the familiar ’satellite’ and ‘terrain’ viewing options for maps, you can know click on ‘more’ then click the Wikipedia check box. In a flash the big serif W you know and love blankets mother earth, offering thousands of links to articles with geographic coordinates.

A great feature, and another novel way to explore the depths of Wikipedia’s millions and millions of articles.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Earlier today I sent a note to some of our public mailing lists to advise that our 2006 IRS Form 990 (covering the fiscal year of July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007) was filed electronically with the IRS on May 12. This is a required annual filing related to our status as a U.S. non-profit, charitable foundation.

This form, in a slightly amended version, must be available publicly at our office site. As a service to the community and the public, we are pleased to be sharing a PDF version of the filing on the Wikimedia Foundation website.

In anticipation of any questions, we have also prepared a Question and Answer sheet also posted on the Foundation wiki.

Of course we’d be happy to field any other questions you might have.

Regards,

Véronique Kessler
Chief Financial and Operating Officer

Earlier this month Wikimedia Foundation General Counsel Mike Godwin participated in the latest Berkeley Cybersalon event. Alongside recently published author and journalist Farhad Manjoo and blogger Zo Spencer, Mike tackled the topic of life in a “post fact” society; one which is punctuated by the belief that truth may be in the eye of the masses, and not with the traditional intellectual authorities.

The talk was taped by Fora.tv and is now available for free viewing on-line.

J. 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…

• who wikis?
• how can we wiki better?
• what will wikipedia look like in 20 years?
• how to retain and grow users and volunteers

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

Over at his fine blog, Jakob Voss has highlighted some neat work by design students at Texas State University.

From Jakob’s blog:

Mike Perez, design student at Texas State University, and his fellow students Mark Decker and Jacob Brubaker have created a wonderful campaign for Wikipedia in their design class. The posters or ads each show a straight view of an everyday person as an expert on a specific subject and a mind map of their thought process. This are the best ads for Wikipedia that I have seen since the Wikipedia promotion images that André created back in 2005 for the German Wikipedia. Just have a look (photos at flickr only because of copyright restrictions) and enjoy if you like Wikipedia as much as I do!

Nice work! Let us know if you’ve seen any other creative treatments…

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Greetings from Maker Faire 2008 here in San Mateo, California! This busy event is attracting hordes of people from all over the Bay Area and beyond. The Wikimedia booth, manned by volunteers and staff alike, is getting a constant barrage of persons interested in all of the Wikimedia sites.

A number of people are shocked when they find out they can edit themselves, and for a few, their first experience in editing is taking place today, right here at the Wikimedia booth.

I’ve included a few photographs to demonstrate a bit of what took place. More photos are available at the Maker Faire gallery on Wikimedia Commons.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator.

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

This is not a very exciting title for a post, granted, but this little file contains quite a bit of power, especially on the Wikimedia websites. The little lines of command found in this file tell us what pages should not be included when search engines like Google or Yahoo! spider Wikimedia content.

Many of the commands in robots.txt are there for technical reasons. For example, we do not want search engines to index dynamically-generated pages, such as the Search page, because this would put too much of a load on our servers.

However, we have also included some discussion pages in robots.txt. The issue here is not so much article content but rather all the bickering, flamewars, and name-calling that we often find on discussion pages.

Consider this one aspect: Search engines are used constantly by employers hunting for information about prospective employees. Imagine a candidate being rejected because of an unanswered late entry to a year-and-a-half old conversation telling Joe Q. Lastnamehere that he is a liar and con man and his authority is fraudulent. You may believe that such an employer would be legally wrong to base a hiring decision on such a frail source, but people make these sorts of decisions all the time by using search engines.

Robots.txt already keeps search engines from spidering several types of discussion, including page deletion discussions on several wikis. By excluding those pages from search engines, we can keep the discussion on-wiki without broadcasting “non-notable” or “spammer” on every search. This has dramatically reduced the number of complaints our OTRS volunteers have received about these discussions.

As some of our users have discovered, though, there is another hazard of search engines: user discussion pages. These pages often contain users’ real names, and often call those people “vandals” or “plagiarists” or “biased”. These can be as bad as deletion discussions, if not worse.

All projects should be aware of the potential hazards of not including these pages in spidering. It may be time to coordinate your language namespaces so that you may be able to prevent any hazardous issues resulting from non-mainspace discussions about people. You can request that the developers add items to the robots.txt file by filing a bug at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org.

Very truly yours,
Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator