Planeta Wikimedia

Wikimedia Česká republika je – jak bylo i na tomto blogu mnohokrát zdůrazňováno – nezisková organizace, která je závislá především na dobrovolné práci členů a dobrovolné pomoci dárců, ať už jde o dary materiální, nebo finanční. V souvislosti s celosvětovou sbírkou na Wikipedii, kterou uspořádala na konci minulého roku Wikimedia Foundation, se i na naše sdružení obrátili mnozí spokojení uživatelé Wikipedie a jejích sesterských projektů se zájmem pomoci jí jinou cestou než darem americkému ústředí.

Je nejvyšší čas poděkovat všem těm, kteří dostali pocit, že právě naše sdružení může zajistit další rozvoj Wikipedie, a proto své dary zaslali na naše konto. Byli to:

• SIT a.s. – 2000 Kč
• Jan Prokop – 200 Kč
• anonymní dárce – 500 Kč
• Ing. Blahomír Skoupý – 1000 Kč
• Meritum Software – 7000 Kč
• Milan Hradil – 500 Kč
• Ing. Ivan Havel – 10 000 Kč
• Dukan Praha s.r.o. – 10 000 Kč
• RNDr. Oldřich Nedvěd – 500 Kč
• RNDr. Jindřich Petrlík – 600 Kč
• Eva Němcová – 100 Kč
• MUDr. Jiří Najbrt – 1000 Kč
• Ing. Karel Steiner – 400 Kč
• Dr. Mgr. Daniel Mališ – 10 000 Kč
• Dalibor Kučera – 300 Kč
• Petr Piskač – 1000 Kč
• Marie Šedivá – 200 Kč
• Ing. Luboš Kabelík – 400 Kč
• Jaroslav Plachý – 500 Kč
• Marcel Mráz – 200 Kč
• Josef Smetana – 500 Kč
• Jana Slabá – 500 Kč
• Petr Bulguris – 500 Kč
• L. Kepková Abrahámová – 2500 Kč

Jsme moc vděční za to, že díky všem dárcům můžeme i v dalším roce plánovat podobně bohatou činnost jako v roce minulém. Můžete se tedy znovu těšit na účast Wikimedie na velkých výstavách a veletrzích v čele se Světem knihy, na bohatou publikační činnost o Wikipedii, na pokračování přednáškového cyklu pro zájemce o poučení o tom, jak Wikipedie funguje a jak se jí dá věřit, na workshopy, konferenci a další projekty. S prostředky z vašich darů budeme moci otevřeněji nabídnout své služby i těm řadovým tvůrcům Wikipedie a jejích sesterských projektů, kteří se s žádostí o tyto služby na nás sami obrátí.

Děkujeme Vám mnohokrát, naši milí přátelé, a vůbec děkujeme mnohokrát všem dárcům, kteří nám pomohli, pomáhají a pomůžou … pomáhat Wikipedii. Upozorňujeme zároveň všechny minulé i budoucí dárce, že nás mohou kdykoli kontaktovat (viz stránka kontakt na našem webu) a my jim připravíme potřebné podklady včetně potvrzení pro odpis daru ze základu daně z příjmů.

Wikipedie v hebrejštině překonala metu 100 tisíc článků a při té příležitosti se dočkala významného společenského uznání. 3. února proběhlo v izraelském parlamentu běžně známém jako Kneset zvláštní veřejné zasedání výboru pro vědu a techniku s názvem Přínos hebrejské Wikipedie k vzdělanosti v Izraeli.

Předseda výboru Meir Šítrit na jednání mimo jiné prohlásil: „Mým snem bylo dosáhnout toho, aby každé dítě dostalo zdarma hebrejsky psanou encyklopedii. Když jsem byl ministrem školství, pracoval jsem na tom, aby se knížky potřebné ve školách nahrávaly na internet. Wikipedie plní mé sny – přináší informace dostupné každému dítěti.“

Naše sesterská organizace Wikimedia Izrael setkání využila mimo jiné k tomu, aby prezentovala některé problémy související s autorskými právy na úřední díla, učebnice a otázky svobodné tvorby. Šítrit přislíbil, že v příštím týdnu předloží Knessetu návrhy právních předpisů, podle kterých by všechna obrazová díla vytvořená státními úřady měla být k dispozici k volnému užití bez autorských práv.

Mimochodem – česká Wikipedie v nejbližších dnech překoná ještě vyšší metu – 150 tisíc článků, i když cesta k podobnému uznání bude ještě dlouhá.

V malém sále MK se v prosinci konala i Wikikonfence

4. února: Jak používat Wikipedii
Wikipedii používá většina lidí na internetu, ale jen menšina umí využít množství informací, které její články nabízejí. Víte, že Wikipedie není jen encyklopedie, ale jde v ní a v příbuzných projektech najít i mnoho samostatně použitelných obrázků, historických dokumentů nebo volně přístupných knih? Dozvíte se postupy, jak tyto projekty a především Wikipedii co nejlépe využívat.

11. února: Úprava článků na Wikipedii
Kdokoliv může upravovat informace v článcích na Wikipedii, ale mnoho jejích uživatelů neví jak, přestože pro vylepšení článku stačí znát pět základních editačních postupů. Budou zároveň představeny zásady, které by měli editoři Wikipedie dodržovat.

18. února: Jde Wikipedii věřit?
Důvěryhodnost informací nalezených na internetu je rozdílná. U článků ve Wikipedii je hlavním prvkem jejich důvěryhodnosti citování původních zdrojů. Kromě ukázek citování bude poodhrnuto i „zákulisí“ Wikipedie: jak články vznikají, jak se vyvíjejí a jaké má Wikipedie vnitřní nástroje k udržování jejich kvality.

Všechny přednášky se konají ve čtvrtek od 19 hod. v malém sále Městské knihovny v Praze, Mariánské nám. 1, Praha 1.
Vstupné je 30 Kč

Leták ke stažení (PDF)

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.  Telefónica will be working with the Wikimedia Foundation to increase the reach and accessibility of free knowledge for millions of their customers.  Through their mobile, IPtv, broadband, and other platforms they will soon begin to provide fast and innovative access to educational information from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Telefónica has a particularly strong presence in Latin America, a part of the world experiencing an incredible rise in access to the internet, and a place where we hope to see considerable increases to our free knowledge materials.

Over the course of this three-year partnership we plan to jointly develop new approaches to sharing Wikimedia project information, particularly through Telefónica’s very large base of mobile subscribers. Telefónica has also expressed a strong interest in working with local chapters to support local outreach and education activities.  Last year they supported Wikimania in Buenos Aires.

Starting 31 January and during the entire month of February 2010, participating museums in Great Britain are joining with people from all ages, backgrounds and communities to celebrate Britain Loves Wikipedia.  The public is encouraged to photograph the multitude of national treasures contained in Britain’s collections, releasing them under a free license to be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles and much more.

The initiative is being spearheaded by the volunteer chapter based in the United Kingdom, Wikimedia UK.  Wikimedia’s volunteer chapters (which now number at 27 and continue to grow) support the movement by carrying out fundraising, public outreach, and relationship building in their respective territories.

You can read more about Britain Loves Wikipedia on the Wikimedia UK blog here. If you’re in the UK through the coming month, join up and help grow Wikimedia’s collection of freely reusable images and media!

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator

Danese Cooperová se dnes postavila do čela technické sekce nadace Wikimedia Foundation, která provozuje Wikipedii a další projekty Wikimedia. Její uvedení do funkce chief technical officera oznámila nadace v tiskové zprávě. Cooperová je známá jako velmi významná postava světové open-sourceové komunity.

„Jako dlouholetý nadšenec do Wikipedie a člověk, který po celém světě podporuje svobodně šířené vědění, jsem nadšená možností přímo se účastnit rozvoje Wikimedia Foundation. Vstupuji do skvělého týmu, ať už jde o samotnou nadaci, nebo o komunity, které podporuje. Nemohu se dočkat, až začnu!“ neskrývá Cooperová očekávání.

Jednapadesátiletá programátorka v minulých deseti letech působila ve vedoucích funkcích v tomto oboru u takových gigantů, jako jsou Sun Microsystems, Intel a REvolution computing. Před tím byla pracovala i ve společnostech Microsoft, Apple Computers nebo Symantec.

Nadace tak obsadila místo, které bylo uvolněné od odchodu Briona Vibbera.

I’m delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has hired a new Chief Technical Officer, Danese Cooper. Danese is an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.  You can read more about this great news in the Foundation press release that went out today.

Danese has a wealth of experience in open source technology. Most recently, she developed open source strategy for the tech start-up REvolution Computing. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Open Source Strategies at Intel from 2005 until 2009, and Chief Open Source Evangelist at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2005. In those roles, she led or supported major open source initiatives, including Sun’s OpenOffice.org application suite, the Java platform, JXTA, NetBeans, GridEngine, OpenSolaris and Intel’s Channel Software Operations and Moblin platform initiatives. Prior to working at Sun, she managed technology teams at Symantec and at Apple Computing for a total of nine years.

Danese is a Board member at the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit organization that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves open source software licenses. She is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on a Special Advisory Board for Mozilla.

As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting and developing Wikimedia’s open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to support increases in Wikimedia projects’ reach, quality and participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer community is critical to Wikimedia’s ability to successfully serve people in multiple geographies and languages.

We’d also like to thank the Walker Talent Group for its pro bono work helping recruit Danese, as well as Advisory Board member Roger McNamee for introducing Wikimedia to Walker. Their help is much appreciated.

Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Sharing in the sum of all human knowledge requires us to go to the sources. Beyond citations to books, journals, and websites, knowledge comes alive through images, video, and audio footage. We can travel to the beginnings of human history and admire the beauty of the Venus of Brassempouy carved from mammoth ivory 25,000 years ago. We can marvel at 2000-year-old mummy portraits that capture the dead in vivid colors. We can immerse ourselves in an Easter procession of the 19th century painted in incredible realism by Ilya Repin. We can listen to the earliest sound recording of a human voice, which could only successfully be played back two years ago for the first time.

Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (a collective we refer to as “GLAM”) document, showcase, preserve and protect our cultural treasures. The Internet gives us the opportunity to share digital entry points to the fuller experience that cultural institutions can offer. With more than 340 million unique visitors every month, Wikipedia is the central entry point for research in the Internet-connected world.

The international Wikimedia volunteer movement is therefore naturally aligned with the public service mission of cultural institutions. Over the last year, we have seen an acceleration of partnerships to bring content online. This is also a result of the emergence of Wikimedia’s world-wide presence through chapter organizations founded by volunteers, which exist in 27 countries.

For the first time, we now have compelling data that shows the success of these partnerships, and the virtuous circle they can inspire. We also can use the same metrics to track the success of Wikimedia’s other content outreach initiatives.

Measuring success

Developing improved content usage metrics was one of the key priorities identified at the Multimedia Usability Meeting in Paris (see previous report). Thanks to the work done by Bryan Tong Minh, who attended the meeting, the usage of every media file in our media repository is now fully tracked across different Wikimedia projects and languages. Based on this, Magnus Manske, another volunteer and Paris attendee, developed two useful scripts that help us track the usage of entire collections of content:

• “Glamorous“, which enumerates where media from a collection are used (e.g. which Wikipedia languages);
• “Amalglamate“, which tracks comparative collection usage data over time (starting January 12).

Using these scripts, we can analyze the impact of our content partnerships in real-time. For example:

In December 2008, Wikimedia Germany developed a partnership with the German Federal Archives resulting in the donation of 80,000 images, most of which relate to German history. As required by Wikimedia policy, these images were donated under a free content license which allows anyone to re-use them, provided proper credit is given.

Of the 82,458 images uploaded, 18.3%, or 15,109 images, are in active use in Wikimedia’s projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks).

The most frequently used [1] photograph from the collection is the photograph of Willy Brandt, German Chancellor from 1969 to 1974. It is used in 60 language editions of Wikipedia, with a total of 83 uses.

Effectively, this photograph of Willy Brandt becomes an iconic image that web users from around the world will see when researching the politician, in any of these languages: Aragonese, Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Breton, Bosnian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Fiji Hindi, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Ido, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latin (!), Lithuanian, Low Saxon, Lower Sorbian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. And it’s just one of more than 15,000 images from the collection that are already in active use, about a year after first being made available.

These tools do not yet show the number of pageviews of the articles in question, although that data is available. For example, the German Wikipedia article about Willy Brandt was viewed 38,449 times in December 2009. Considering the combined language usage of Wikipedia, the use of images in many articles creates a large aggregate impact.

Like all media files in Wikimedia Commons, the image is available under a free content license, the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. This means that it is usable by third parties as well, provided that proper credit is given. Tracking third party usage is, of course, more difficult. The MediaWiki software powering Wikimedia projects has built-in support for Wikimedia Commons (called “InstantCommons“), meaning that any wiki, anywhere, can immediately use files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons if this feature is enabled. For example, you can view the Willy Brandt image on WikiEducator (not a Wikimedia project), with all the same metadata, even though it has never been uploaded there. In the future, we may be able to track image usage across third party MediaWiki installations as well.

The Virtuous Circle

Not only do these images enrich articles in many languages, they also make it easier for people in languages that don’t have an article to get started. And, importantly, they drive awareness of the cultural institutions that provided them — as each and every image carries a visible seal when clicked:

Note how even the seal itself has been translated into 23 languages already. The images carry the original metadata provided by the Bundesarchiv:

This links back to a copy hosted on the archive’s servers. Because the descriptions and other data in the records of the German Federal Archives sometimes contain errors, there’s a dedicated page that lets volunteers submit corrections. This page is regularly reviewed by the archive’s employees, and corrections are incorporated into its records.

The usage of the images therefore drives interest in the content, awareness of the institutions, improvements of the metadata — and hopefully incentivizes other institutions to follow. Since the German Federal Archives, several large content partnerships have been established:

• The donation of 250,000 historic images by the German “Fotothek” (more info)
• The donation of 39,000 images about Suriname and Indonesia by the Dutch Tropenmuseum (more info), with more to follow

• “Wiki Loves Art Netherlands“, a large-scale competition to take photos of artistic objects, with more than 40 participating cultural institutions, resulting in more than 4,000 image uploads to Wikimedia Commons
• The upload of 140 videos from the Dutch newsreel Polygoon-journal
• The upload of more than 30,000 images of ants from the open AntWeb archive by its maintainers

Beyond partnering with cultural institutions, Wikimedia chapters have also taken a leadership role in documenting the world around us through picture competitions, expeditions, and workshops. The aforementioned metrics can be used to track which models produce content that ends up being widely used in Wikimedia’s projects. Examples include:

• a project by Wikimedia Česká republika to document Czech municipalities (funded through WMF’s chapters grants program), which so far has resulted in more than 2,000 uploaded photographs;
• the Israeli “Pikiwiki” project, a dedicated platform for donating photographs from Israeli history and society, which has resulted in more than 5,000 uploaded photos;
• financial support by chapters for travel, event attendance, etc., such as Wikimedia France’s funding program, which has resulted in nearly 5,000 uploaded photographs.

The usage of images from these and other initiatives will now be tracked over time. Of course, having such metrics is only the beginning, and WMF will invest in global program support capacity to ensure that we learn from, document, and incentivize best practices.

Managing growth

Altogether, Wikimedia Commons has achieved extraordinary growth over the past year. Launched in September 2004, it took two years for the multimedia repository to reach the milestone of one million files. We’re now at almost six million files, two million of which were added in the last 12 months.  More content partnerships, new video functionality, and improved usability (see earlier post) will further accelerate this growth.

Thanks to Wikimedia’s large network of supporters, we can keep up with this growth. It’s been a much closer call this time than we would like, as the chart below showing our recently shrinking media storage capacity illustrates (out of a total of 8 terabytes):

But yesterday, we put into service a new media storage server which more than triples our total storage capacity (it will be redundantly mirrored to a second server with the same capacity). This, too, is likely only the beginning. Wikimedia Commons is not comparable to websites like Flickr or Picasa: it does not aim to document vacations, parties, and precious life moments. It is a repository of educational media. But there’s a world full of riches waiting to still be brought closer to the minds of millions.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

[1] excluding the use of images for purposes of navigation and topical representation on a large number of articles

Contact a local Wikimedia chapter

Further reading:

• In August 2009, Wikimedia Australia organized the “GLAM-Wiki” conference, bringing together 170 representatives of the Australian and New Zealand cultural sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums – GLAMs). One of the work products of the conference was a series of recommendations to Wikimedia, to cultural institutions, and to policymakers. These recommendations show that our work is far from complete. They are also an example of transparent and honest dialogue.
• The Wikimedia Outreach team is developing resources and documentation to help Wikimedians in their work with cultural institutions:
  • Case study of the Tropenmuseum partnership
  • Case study of the German Federal Archives partnership
  • In a nutshell: How to build a content partnership

Upcoming events:

• On April 13, 2010, Wikimedia volunteers and Wikimedia Foundation representatives will participate in a one-day workshop as part of the “Museums and the Web 2010” conference (“Wikimedia@MW2010“) to further explore and promote the active engagement between the communities.
• On January 31, 2010, Wikimedia UK will kick off Britain Loves Wikipedia, a month-long photo competition that invites the general public to take photos of cultural treasures in participating institutions, for the primary purpose of illustrating Wikipedia articles

Some new faces have joined the Foundation’s multimedia usability project, and important developments are underway to improve uploading and sharing of multimedia materials on Wikimedia’s projects.

We are excited that Guillaume Paumier, Product Manager of the Ford multimedia usability project , has moved from Toulouse, France and joined the Wikimedia usability team at our San Francisco office. We are also excited that Neil Kandalgaonkar has joined the multimedia usability project as a software developer. Neil brings in rich technical background from major social networking sites such as Flickr and Upcoming.org.

The multimedia usability project will focus on the following three areas:

• Simplify and streamline the media uploading process to Wikimedia Commons
• Create a staging area where incomplete work can be reviewed and amended
• Integrate interwiki uploading so that uploads from Wikimedia projects are directed to Commons (the binary repository for all Wikimedia projects) seamlessly, and support moving of existing files from Wikimedia projects to Commons

These focuses were determined based on the discussion at the multi-media usability meeting in Paris with active Wikimedia Commons contributors and the objective of the Ford grant to increase participation to Wikimedia Commons.

We have a lot of ideas and features we would like to improve, but our resources are limited; we need to prioritize and focus on a few core changes. In order to accomplish various aspects of the usability of Wikimedia Commons, collaboration with the volunteer contributor community and partnership with our global chapters will be vital to achieve successful results. The multi-media usability meeting in Paris sponsored by Wikimedia France was immensely valuable to set the groundwork for this project. Wikimedia Deutschland is leading an initiative in the development of multi lingual search so that rich internationalized content can be retrieved by a global audience.

Guillaume has been actively publishing his initial research work, the survey result, user interviews and domain research to the multimedia hub of the usability wiki. He is also working on the initial mock-ups of simplified user work flow for uploading media files to Commons. Have a look and post your feedback on the discussion page.

We are also working with Michael Dale to integrate an Add-Media-Wizard into the enhanced Wikimedia project toolbar which is currently offered as a part of the usability beta. Add-Media-Wizard allows users to search relevant media files from Wikipedia articles and insert into the article without leaving the editing window. Michael’s work is already available as a gadget, but the plan is to offer to wider audience by integrating into user preferences. To have a sneak peek of this feature, you can visit the usability sandbox. Just click the image icon in the toolbar, and you can experience the intuitive way of including media assets. Please be aware that the sandbox is an experimental area, so the condition of the software changes constantly.

If you’re online and have access to IRC you can join the multimedia usability team for ‘office hours,’ where we’ll be available live to take questions and discuss ongoing work around the usability project. The next office hours take place Thursday, February 4 at 9AM to 10AM PDT (16:00 to 17:00 UTC). Visit the IRC Office Hours planning page for more info and for assistance in joining the conversation.

More usability improvements are coming! Stay tuned.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager
Wikimedia Usability Inititative

We’re very pleased to announce the release of the Foundation’s second annual report, covering the 2008/2009 fiscal year.  The Foundation’s annual report covers a full year of activity, highlighting our fiscal operations, programs and outreach successes, major milestones, and of course the work of thousands of volunteers and chapters around the world.

This year you’ll find a new annual time-line that showcases major events through the year, and also a center spread featuring details and facts about an incredible article created during the previous fiscal year.

As always, the images and information in the report are all under the creative commons CCBYSA 3.0 license, including images from many Wikimedia volunteers with principal photography by Lane Hartwell, a San Francisco-based photographer.  This year’s report was designed by Exbrook, a design strategy firm based in San Francisco led by Rhonda Rubenstein and David Peters.

Thanks to all who supported the production – looking forward to hearing your comments and suggestions.

Jay Walsh, Communications

On this day in 2001, Wikipedia, a small, experimental project with a big mission was introduced to the world by Founder Jimmy Wales. Nine years later, growing at unprecedented speed, due to the dedicated and enthusiastic support of volunteers and contributors, Wikipedia has evolved into one of the most important sources of free information and knowledge in the world.  Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

In 2002, only celebrating one year of existence, Wikipedia grew to over 20,000 articles– and in its second year,  130,000 articles in 28 languages. To wax nostalgic, you can turn back the hands of time and rummage through “vintage” Wikipedia here. Since then, over 14 million articles in 270 languages have been created.  For millions of people everywhere, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of their daily lives– a resource relied on by hundreds of millions of  visitors a month — and growing.

In celebration of this milestone, Wikipedians in Bangalore, India and New York City have planned events.  If you’re celebrating with us, post a comment and tell us how, or even better, add photos to Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks, Wikipedia! Here’s to another year wiser!

Moka Pantages, Communications

Opakovaně si nás lidé pletou. Když chtějí něco zásadního změnit na Wikipedii, když si chtějí na Wikipedii postěžovat, nebo na druhou stranu když jí chtějí pomoci, obrací se na sdružení Wikimedia Česká republika.

S tou pomocí to ještě jde. Naše sdružení má za cíl pomáhat Wikipedii, takže v tomto směru si můžete vybrat jako jednu z cest právě podporu našeho sdružení a jeho prostřednictvím i podporu Wikipedie.

Pokud ale jde o obsah Wikipedie, ten vzniká zásluhou jednotlivých tvůrců – wikipedistů a dohlíží na něj jedině celá komunita Wikipedie, nikdo zvenčí. Natož sdružení Wikimedia Česká republika.

Pokud se vám tedy stane, že budete mít problém s něčím, co je na Wikipedii, můžete se třeba obrátit na naše sdružení, abychom vám poradili, jak z toho ven. Dostanete od nás rady a především informace, jak Wikipedie funguje a kde se dozvíte víc. To, že jako nějaká hlavní redakce zasáhneme a obsah Wikipedie okamžitě změníme, ale není možné.

Clocking in at 52 million words today, Hebrew Wikipedia announced they’ve reached 100,000 articles.  At 16:54 UTC, user: Brookli submitted an article about Seaton Delaval Hall, a 16th century English country home. The largest encyclopedia written in the Hebrew language got its start six and half years ago, July 9, 2003, with an article on Mathematics by user: Rotem Dan.

Hebrew Wikipedia is among the top 30 language Wikipedias of 270 languages worldwide.  To commemorate the event, on Friday, January 15th, the community will hold a meeting in Israel at Tel Aviv University where 100 Wikipedia contributors will discuss the state of Wikipedia today and in the future. This event will be streamed live beginning at 07:30 UTC on Friday:  http://www.livestream.com/wikipediaisrael.

Congratulations to all of those who helped Hebrew Wikipedia reach such an important milestone.

Mazal Tov!

Moka Pantages, Communications

Wow!  We’ve just closed the most successful fundraiser in the history of the Wikimedia Foundation thanks to our  amazing donors. Over 230,000 people came together and showed their support for our project and mission: to provide free and open knowledge to everyone around the world. Thank you!

Again, we’re ending our annual fundraiser early due to the overwhelming and rapid support from everyone.   We’ve hit and surpassed our fundraising goal of $7.5 million, raising over $8 million in just two months.

Even more, we’re humbled by the fact that during serious global economic stress, folks were still willing to help out and contribute.  More than 230,000 donors have shown that they want Wikipedia to continue to be a place for free and open information.  More than 230,000 have joined together to keep Wikipedia free of ads.  We are extremely grateful for your generosity.

I cannot say enough about how amazing the steadfast support from everyone has been: our donors, our contributors, our chapters; everyone involved directly influenced the immense success of this year’s effort. Again, a huge thank you from me and everyone from the Wikimedia Foundation.  We look forward to sharing some more detailed findings about this year’s fundraiser in the coming weeks.

Happy New Year,

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Wikimedia UK is celebrating “Public Domain Day,” this Friday, January 1, 2010.  The first day of every year in the United Kingdom, copyright expires on published works by individuals who died 70 years prior–this year in 1939.  Works by these individuals fall into the Public Domain in the UK. This year, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, the early works of Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Rackham’s classic children’s book illustrations will be released and made available.

You can read more about Wikimedia UK’s plans for Public Domain Day here.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

We’re excited to report that this weekend, the German language edition of Wikipedia reached an exciting milestone: one million articles! The article was created by user: JFKCom at 11:33am UTC, December 27, 2009, covering the living biography of American horticulturist and author, Ernie Wasson. The new article has already been edited over 200 times by scores of contributors within the first few days of its existence. JFKCom, first name Jürgen, lives in Coburg, a town in Bavaria, and has a deep interest in botany which inspired him to create the article.

German language Wikipedia, the second largest Wikipedia in the world, debuted eight years ago with the inaugural entry created on May 12, 2001. Since then, German speaking contributors hit 500,000 entries in 2006 and 750,000 in 2008. With more than 1.4 billion page views a month, German language Wikipedia is also the second most viewed language edition. Wikipedians created a virtual quilt to celebrate the event.

Congratulations to all volunteers; your work and dedication has resulted in one of the most revered collections of knowledge on the Web. We thank you for your contributions!

Moka Pantages, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

Milí příznivci Wikipedie a sdružení Wikimedia Česká republika, přejeme vám za celé sdružení krásný Štědrý den, spokojené prožití dalších svátků vánočních a vydařený vstup do nového roku. Věříme, že vás čeká bohatá nadílka nejen dárků, ale i dalších radostí a potěšení ze sváteční atmosféry.

Vánoční čas je nejen časem na dostávání dárků, ale také na obdarovávání ostatních. Právě v těchto týdnech probíhá velká výroční sbírka Wikimedia Foundation. Americká nadace, která zajišťuje po technické stránce provoz Wikipedie a jejích sesterských projektů, je neziskovou organizací. Je závislá na pomoci nejen velkých partnerů, ale také tisíců malých dárců. Pokud pravidelně využíváte bezplatné služby Wikipedie, zvažte, zda není na čase vrátit aspoň symbolicky část toho, co vám Wikipedie dala.

Nadace Wikimedia Foundation letos umožnila jednotlivým národním pobočkám, aby se podílely na její celosvětové sbírce. Této možnosti využilo několik poboček, mezi kterými není Wikimedia Česká republika. Podmínky nastavené nadací pro spoluúčast na sbírce nedovolovaly rychlé vyřízení všech náležitostí předepsaných českými zákony pro aktivní zapojení našeho sdružení. Wikimedia Česká republika ale plně podporuje sbírku Wikimedia Foundation a i ona se připojuje k prosbám mj. zakladatele Wikipedie Jimba Walese o životně důležitou finanční podporu hnutí Wikimedia.

Prostředky, které zašlete nadaci Wikimedia Foundation, podpoří údržbu a rozšiřování technického zázemí, rozvoj softwarové platformy MediaWiki i další propagaci a rozšiřování myšlenek svobodné tvorby a principů Wikimedia. Nejrůznější přínos, který se dostaví zásluhou vašich darů, bude nepochybně – byť třeba jen v malé a zdánlivě nepatrné míře – poznat i při vašem každodenním užívání Wikipedie. Děkujeme vám.

Sdružení Wikimedia Česká republika při své neúčasti na sbírce nadace dále spoléhá na individuální jednání s potenciálními sponzory a dárci, které oslovujeme nebo kteří nás sami kontaktují proto, že je jejich vlastní zájem dovede k snaze podpořit přímo naši vlastní činnost. Dovolte nám, abychom poděkovali především našim největším letošním partnerům – společnostem Active 24, s. r. o., Koutná & Slušná, advokátní kancelář v. o. s., Bono Art, s. r. o., Tiskárna Libertas, Klubu deskových her Paluba a pořadatelům výstav a veletrhů LinuxExpo, Svět knihy, Podzimního knižního veletrhu a LIBRI/Schola mea. A v neposlední řadě vedle nich i menším dobrovolným dárcům, kteří pro nás mají rovněž nezastupitelný význam. Děkujeme.

Wikipedie vás obdarovává každý den na internetu, dejte jí prosím i vy svůj vánoční dárek.

Krásné Vánoce!

Hey All–

First and foremost, a big thank you to all our donors, community, and supporters for all the time & money given to this Annual Fundraiser.  The Wikimedia Foundation would not exist without the support and goodwill of our community.

We have some more statistics and information to share with everyone about the great success of this year’s fundraiser.

As you all can see, our progress this year has been pretty darn good.   Our “Jimmy Appeal” is working quite well, making $430,000 on its first full day up, and another $345,000 on the second.  This picture (from WMF techie Trevor Parscal) probably shows it best:  http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:FundraiserStatistics-Blog.jpg.    I hope to discuss that in a future blog post.

Secondly, a long awaited link: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionTrackingStatistics.  This is part of the data that we use to evaluate site notice performance.  You will see the number of donations, total donations, and largest gifts for our different site notices for each day.  Eventually, we would like to put out all the data for all fundraising dates; however, due to processing limitations, we can only have one week of data available.

Landing pages names Support, Support2, and Appeal2 are different types of pre-payment pages.  Sometimes we test different versions to compare results.   For the current Jimmy Appeal, most donors are randomly shunted to either (Appeal ==> Support2) or (Appeal2). We are comparing those results for future campaigns.  In the past, we also tested 5Facts and Change the World landing pages.   PP = donations made via Paypal and CC = credit card payment through our new credit card gateway.   You can also sort by column by clicking on the sort arrows.

Thirdly, I think I need to admit that I’ll never have a perfect understanding of how well any particular site notice will do.  I can suspect that certain ones will do well, or certain ones will fail, but I’m constantly reminded that the donation data from our users never quite aligns with what I expect.

For instance, we developed a banner based on this donor quote:

“I couldn’t ignore that banner at the top of the site anymore… I use Wikipedia far too often to ignore the need!”

To me, it’s too long and a bit awkwardly phrased.  I did not think it would hold up well to sweet, simple, short phrases we’ve tried in the past.   I do acknowledge that it has some humor and poignancy behind it.

The results?

2009_Notice42 did incredibly well.  “Crushing all in it’s path” (this is before the onset of the Jimmy Appeal) would be more accurate, but the message is drawing in a number of donors.  Running at 20% of English page views with 5 other banners in rotation, the results are glaring:

Now, why do you think it’s working so well?   Is it a combination of previous messages?  What other messages do you think would work well?

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Hey All–

We’ve been tracking a huge amount of data during this year’s fundraiser so we can better understand which messages work well and which don’t.  We have two sets of banners that we set each day to run on all Wikipedia languages.  Set one is the English version; set two is all non-English versions.

We have two sets because we want our banners to run globally only if they are translated…which can take some time and volunteer effort.  This is why our non-English banners rotate slowly.  However, with English banners, we can build a banner quickly and put it up to see how it does.

Let’s go into some detail on selecting a rotation.  On December 3rd, our rotation and results (pp = Paypal, cc = credit card):

As you can see, we had three different notices running at 20% and one banner, taken from one of the better notices from 2008’s fundraiser, 2009_Notice30_bold running at 40%.  It did well throughout last week.

As you can see, 2009_Notice18 pulled in a huge number of gifts despite only showing 20% of the time.   Also, it had a significantly lower average gift…probably as a result of the message itself.   Despite the low average gift, people seemed to really respond to the message…and donated lots.

We are wary of banner-fatigue and saturation, where users might be tired of seeing the same message, so we changed banners around for the next day.

Looking at December 4th, 2009:

We introduced 2009_Notice40 (“Thanks, Wikipedia.”) to the mix and cut back on another.   All five banners in rotation are at 20%.  Two of the banners are greatly outperforming the others.  We like what #40 is doing…but #18 is still rocking…1001 donations while the next closest is 507 donations (#40).

Again, we switched things up, removing #17, and adding 2009_Notice22, a similar, but opposite message to #18, which has been successful.

December 5th, 2009:

This day is a fascinating look at our banners and our user population.  Notice the results of #18 and #22…they are similar yet contrasting messages.   #18 is an quote from a small dollar donation (USD 1.95), acknowledging the sincerity of the gift.  #22 is a quote from a high dollar donation (USD 200),  emphasizing that a big gift is a small matter.

Compare the numbers of gifts for the two banners:

#18: 832 gifts, $15073.47 total
#22: 301 gifts, $9572.83 total

Not close right?  But look at the average gift sizes:

#18:  $15.84 for Paypal, $21.87 for credit card
#22:  $27.92 for Paypal, $36.58 for credit card

That’s quite a difference.  What was it about the message that would account for that?  Is it possible that our more affluent donors were more interested in #22, while other donors were affected by #18?

Post your thoughts below.

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation

Thank you for your feedback and comments about the usability beta through the survey and via the usability project wiki. The usability beta initially started off with the new skin called Vector and the toolbar (release nickname: Acai) in early July and it was enhanced with the navigable table of contents within the editing box and dialogues for links, tables, and search & replace (release nickname: Babaco) at the end of September.

The Babaco features have to be activated through the user preferences. The most recent enhancement was to move the tool for watching and unwatching pages into the top navigation (star icon). This feature was implemented based on a high volume of related user feedback. Navigation tabs now collapse in case tabs start overlapping when the screen resolution is reduced, or where tab widths are wider because of language specific characters.

The usability beta was visited and tested by close to 380,000 users by the end of November 2009. The beta has been drawing roughly 100,000 users every month, and close to 300,000 users have kept the beta enabled as of December 1, 2009. As I briefly summarized in my blog post in September, the beta program was adopted relatively well by the beta users of English Wikipedia (83% retention rate), and in other English language projects such as the English Wikinews (95% retention rate). Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia beta users have the second highest retention rate at 81%. German, Russian, Chinese, French and Italian Wikipedia beta users are retained in the range between 70% and 79%. Retention rate for Polish and Japanese was relatively low, with 65% and 60% respectively.

The list of the beta retention rates for the top ten most visited Wikipedia languages is summarized in this table and the list of all projects in all languages can be found here. The opt-out survey and feedback forms were available to beta users and the survey responses provided rich quantitative and qualitative data to understand how the beta is received and understand the reasons for what people like about the beta and leaving the beta.

One of the questions we sought to answer via the opt-out surveys was the impact of different browser types. The usability tech team has been pounding on Internet Explorer related problems and we thought the browser type will have significant impact on the beta adoption pattern. According to our own browser statistics, about 56% of users access Wikipedia through a version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, and about 30% of users use a version of Mozilla Firefox. The browser distribution pattern for the beta users for the ten mostly visited Wikipedia language family indicates stronger favor towards Firefox over Internet Explorer except for Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia whose browser distribution is dominated by Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. If we slice the beta retention rate by browser distribution, we see the the repeated low retention rate for Internet Explorer users. However the variance of retention rates by browser types is not significant enough to conclude that browser distribution has a substantial impact on the beta adoption.

The qualitative survey responses brought up language-specific issues. Japanese Wikipedia beta users found the font used in the new interface is too small. Chinese beta users also expressed the difficulty adjusting to the smaller font in addition to the perceived slowness of the new interface. Switching between Traditional and Simplified Chinese was not well supported. We hope issues with overlapping tabs expressed by German users have been addressed by the recently released collapsible tabs. Finally, we are aware that we often break popular user gadgets, and we appreciate that developer communities gradually embrace the usability updates so that the gadgets are compatible with the usability beta. The survey comments are available in ten languages so far, and we will continue making the surveys available for more languages.

The usability beta continues to evolve and the usability team is actively working on the next release, Citron. This release will have the new features such as collapsed templates, form interface for editing templates, and side-by-side preview. Citron is currently scheduled to be available in January. Beta feedback will be incorporated in this release to address language specific issues which were surfaced from the survey.

As the general acceptance of the usability beta is supported by a majority of beta users, we would like to start discussing the timing of making the new editing interface and the toolbar the default interface after resolving any remaining language specific issues.

This survey data was analyzed and put together by the team effort. I would like to thank Howie Fung, Product Consultant, for organizing and analyzing the survey data, Nimish Gautam, for integrating machine translation into the qualitative survey, and Roan Kattouw for tracking and normalizing the data.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager
Usability Initiative

Hey All–

This is my first post regarding 2009 Annual Fundraiser.  It’s been an interesting first three weeks — we’ve had some real success, and we’ve learned what was less successful.  With a huge goal this year, we were very ambitious with our plans:

1) Host our own credit card payment processing.  We felt that many of our donors preferred to use credit cards directly, rather than being shuttled off-site, to donate.
2) Create a new look and feel that more closely resembled the Wiki user experience.  We wanted our donors to feel comfortable giving in a familiar environment.
3) Work with outside marketing/communications support from Fenton Communications and SeaChange Strategies on our messaging, design, and strategy.
4) Allow our chapters to fundraise more successfully in their countries.  For that we introduced a GEO IP location system allowing some donors to see chapter specific donation pages.
5) An aggressive matching gift program to encourage higher value gifts.  Omidyar Network offered to match gifts from $100 to $10,000 this year, up to $500,000.
6) Numerous smaller improvements, like mobile giving, social media outreach, and various cool stuff to come.

Thankfully, all those systems are working well (but not perfectly).  As I write this, we have had a successful run (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics) over the last two weeks.  The blue lines are the 2007 totals, the green are the 2008 totals, and the orange are 2009 totals by day of the fundraiser.  Hold your mouse over any bar to see the exact dates, number of donors, and donation totals for each day.

Much like last year, we continue to test many different elements to find ways to appeal to our donors.  During the fundraiser, we will be (and have been) testing the following elements:

• Site Notice messaging (Personal Appeal vs. Slogans vs. Emotional vs. Statistical etc.)
• Site Notice text, bolding, font size, placement.
• Thermometer vs. No Thermometer
• Donate Button vs. No Donate Button
• Landing Pages
• Ask Strings
• Personal Appeals
• And much more.

Each test takes time and technical effort to implement and track and we will attempt to provide detail into those tests as we can.

We largely finished our testing of ask strings on our landing pages.

This landing page has an ask string starting with $35 and going up to $100.
This one has an ask string starting with $250 and going down to $35.

We tested these compared these significantly during the first few weeks.  We noticed that the page with the larger ask string had about a $1 higher average donation with about the same number of transactions.

I hope to be able to share more of our findings about our other landing pages (Change the World and 5 Facts) and site notices (Wikipedia Needs You, Wikipedia Forever, & others) later in the month.

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation

From November 6 to 8, a group of about thirty people met in Paris to discuss how to improve the processes and technologies for contributing multimedia to Wikimedia projects. It was the first meeting of its kind, sponsored and organized by one of Wikimedia’s chapter organizations, Wikimedia France, in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation.

In July, the Wikimedia Foundation received a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to make it easier to add multimedia to our projects (see previous blog post). The purpose of our meeting in Paris was to support the kick-off of this initiative, and to bring volunteers doing multimedia-focused work together with software developers. Beyond the scope of activities within the Ford grant, we hope to see a large number of volunteer projects flourish that will enrich the Wikimedia experience beyond text.

We used the three-day meeting to both plan specific projects and activities, and to actually develop working code. Among the outcomes:

• Increased awareness of our shared activities through demonstrations and discussions (list of projects we reviewed).

• Experimental roll-out of functionality to track usage of media from Wikimedia Commons across other Wikimedia projects; a first implementation of wiki-editable subtitles for videos, and smaller hacks and improvements.

• Draft ideas and concepts for improving the user experience on Wikimedia Commons as a whole: upload, site experience, metadata, search, third party use of Commons content, education about the project mission.

• A clearer articulation of the needs that are specific to working with cultural institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – “GLAM”): case studies and success stories (a first case study was developed at the meeting), metrics, mass uploading tools, support processes, etc.

Developers developing

Summaries and notes from the respective work groups are available. If you’re interested in participating in any of these efforts, feel free to add yourself to the relevant “movers” section.

Unlike Wikimania and other larger Wikimedia gatherings, this meeting was a rare opportunity to focus on one specific problem area, and the first international gathering of this type. This approach turned out to be highly productive, and we hope to be able to use it in other problem areas in the future.

Because it’s rare for such an international and diverse group to meet, some participants met prior to the multimedia meeting to support the Wikimedia-wide strategic planning process; notes from this pre-meeting can be found on the StrategyWiki.

We want to thank all the participants of the Multimedia Usability Meeting for attending, and hope to organize similar meetings focused on other challenges and opportunities in the future. The Wikimedia Foundation wishes to thank Wikimédia France for sponsoring and organizing the meeting. Furthermore, we are grateful to Wikimedia Nederlands, Wikimedia Deutschland, and Wikimedia Polska for additional travel sponsorships. Your donations to the Wikimedia Foundation and to Wikimedia chapters help us to support future meetings like this one.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Delphine Ménard, Treasurer, Wikimédia France

What’s happening to Wikipedia’s volunteer community? Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages”. The article is a comprehensive description of the challenges and opportunities facing the Wikipedia community. Among other things, it describes recent research findings regarding the number of Wikipedia editors. A quote from the article: “In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega.”

Other news stories have further focused on this particular number, some going so far to predict Wikipedia’s imminent demise, others highlighting its strengths and resilience. It’s understandable that media will look for a compelling narrative. Our job is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of what’s going on. This blog post is therefore an attempt to dig deeper into the numbers and into what’s happening with Wikipedia’s volunteer community, and to describe our big picture strategy.

In a nutshell, here’s what we know:

• The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow.  In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September.  Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world.
• The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing.  There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day.
• The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then.  Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people.

The numbers quoted in the Wall Street Journal are the result of analysis by Spanish researcher Dr. Felipe Ortega. Dr. Ortega has conducted valuable research on a wide range of aspects of the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.  It is, however, important to understand the meaning of the cited numbers.  Dr. Ortega’s findings are described in his doctoral thesis “Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis.”

Even more importantly, the findings reported by the Wall Street Journal are not a measure of the number of people participating in a given month. Rather, they come from the part of Dr. Ortega’s research that attempts to measure when individual Wikipedia volunteers start editing, and when they stop. Because it’s impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again, there are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving: Dr. Ortega qualifies as the editor’s “log-off date” the last time they contributed. This is a snapshot in time and doesn’t predict whether the same person will make an edit in the future, nor does it reflect the actual number of active editors in that month.

Dr. Ortega supplements this research with data about the actual participation (number of changes, number of editors) in the different language editions of our projects. His findings regarding actual participation are generally consistent with our own, as well as those of other researchers such as Xerox PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition research group.

What do those numbers show?  Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak 2.5 years ago, and has remained stable since then. (See WikiStats data for all Wikipedia languages combined.) On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000. (See WikiStats data for the English Wikipedia.) Many other Wikipedia language editions saw a rise in the number of editors in the same time period. As a result the overall number of editors on all projects combined has been stable at a high level over recent years. We’re continuing to work with Dr. Ortega to specifically better understand the long-term trend in editor retention, and whether this trend may result in a decrease of the number of editors in the future.

Let’s move on to the bigger picture.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, is to ensure that every single human being can share in the sum of all knowledge. Both the health and growth of our volunteer community are key to succeeding in that endeavor. This is why the Wikimedia Foundation works with researchers from around the world to understand what is happening in its projects, supports comprehensive analytics work, and is pursuing long term initiatives to recruit new editors and support the development of its communities:

• Our usability initiative is making it easier to contribute to Wikipedia and its sister projects by improving the underlying open source technology. Removing barriers is key to recruiting new editors.
• Our outreach initiative is developing a comprehensive set of training and outreach materials that will help us to recruit new volunteer editors.
• Our strategic planning initiative is a unique community-driven process to identify how we can maximize our impact. One of its task forces is specifically studying community health.

Wikimedia chapter organizations around the world are supporting our technology work, our outreach initiatives, and strategic partnerships; their activities are documented in the archive of chapter reports.

The Wikimedia volunteer community is also engaged in important discussions and experiments. A community-initiated project in the English Wikipedia, for example, tried to assess the typical experience of new Wikipedia editors when trying to contribute useful content. This newbie treatment study is directly informing community discussions about community processes. Similar experiments and large strategic discussions are happening in other languages.

These discussions and projects are important. Wikimedia is a unique global volunteer movement to share what we know, to make and keep it available. We need your help and your participation in these initiatives – please follow the above links and get involved.

We want more people to join us, to edit Wikipedia to make it richer and better and more comprehensive. We don’t know what the “perfect” number of Wikipedia volunteers is, but we do know that we want to significantly increase it from where it is today.

In addition to direct volunteer participation, Wikimedia depends on public support. If you share our goal of bringing free knowledge to every person on the planet, please make a donation today.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director
Erik Zachte, Data Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

„Encyklopedie Wikipedie ztrácí přispěvatele!“ Tuto informaci založenou na výzkumu statistik projektu přinesla významná světová média, poprvé snad Wall Street Journal, a s velkým zájmem ji převzala i česká média. Někteří žurnalisti byli překvapeni reakcí vedení nadace Wikimedia Foundation, která přijala výsledky bez rozčilení a s komentářem, že cílem hnutí Wikimedia není vytvářet co největší sociální síť, ale vytvářet co nejrozsáhlejší informační zdroj.

Jak je to možné? Stojí Wikipedie na kraji propasti a nikoho to netrápí? Přispěvatelé odešli v tak masovém počtu, to přece musí na Wikipedii zanechat stopy! Už se nebude rozšiřovat? Blíží se její konec? A kdo nebo co za to může?

Wikipedisté ani nadace Wikimedia Foundation ale opravdu nejsou nijak významně znepokojeni těmito zjištěními. A to ne proto, že by zpráva byla smyšlená nebo výsledky výzkumu zmanipulované. Ve skutečnosti je autor studie Felipe Ortega sám jedním z wikipedistů a o jeho poznatky je mezi zainteresovanými wikipedisty i ve vedení nadace poměrně velký zájem. Právě proto ví, že jde pouze o jeden z mnoha statistických aspektů, které popisují vývoj Wikipedie.

Počet tzv. aktivních editorů, kteří přispívají na Wikipedii delší dobu a větším počtem editací, v posledních měsících a letech nijak neklesá. Počet uložených editací a vytvořených článků neustále roste. Většina statistik naznačuje, že počet dlouhodobých editorů Wikipedie je stabilní a zaručuje s dobrou jistotou další pokračování růstu Wikipedie, a to zejména u desítek menších jazykových mutací, které ještě zdaleka nevyčerpaly ani všechna populární témata.

Ortegova studie ale určitě není vhodná jen do odpadu. Zachycuje trendy ohledně jednoho aspektu a vyvolává množství otázek; přispěla tím už k intenzivní diskusi mezi wikipedisty. Zdá se například, že její čísla jsou vypovídající spíš o uživatelích, kteří udělali třeba jen jedinou editaci. Může tak být dobrým signálem o chování nových nebo krátkou dobu přispívajících uživatelů. Zájemců o přispívání přibývá, ale hodně jich také z projektů jen po několika editacích mizí. Nezdá se ale, že by to prokazovalo ztrátu dynamiky Wikipedie nebo že už není co a o čem psát.

Navzdory odchodu tisíců editorů totiž zůstává u Wikipedie stále mnoho tisíc jiných přispěvatelů, kteří si rozhodně nemyslí, že by Wikipedie „byla hotová“. I na největší, anglické Wikipedii, je naprostá většina článků v uspokojivém, ale ne dokonalém stavu. Wikipedisté vědí, že další zlepšování těchto článků není možné bez čerstvých sil nových přispěvatelů.

Právě snaha o další zpřístupnění Wikipedie zejména novým editorům je jedním z hlavních bodů úsilí hnutí Wikimedia v současnosti. Například anglická Wikipedie přišla s komunitním projektem „Adoptuj uživatele“, v němž zkušení wikipedisté pomáhají konkrétním nováčkům. Snahou o přitáhnutí nových uživatelů a přispěvatelů jde i sdružení Wikimedia Česká republika, které od začátku roku vyvíjí mnohé aktivity, při kterých propaguje Wikipedii a zejména to, že do ní může přispívat každý. I díky těmto nově získaným přispěvatelům česká Wikipedie pokračuje ve svém růstu a právě se blíží k další symbolické metě 150 tisíc článků.

The first ever Wikimedians’ conference is taking place in Tokyo this weekend. A group of Wikimedians, who were inspired by Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt, gathered in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan in the late summer of 2008. Those who traveled to Alexandria shared their excitement and inspiration gathered from Wikimania, and others listened. The excitement in the room turned into collective will power, determined to form a Wikimedians’ conference in Japan within a year from the meeting.

Wikimedia Conference Japan (WCJ) is happening this Sunday, November 22nd, at the University Tokyo’s Hongo Campus. The Center for Knowledge Structuring of the University Tokyo offered the space for this conference. Japanese National Institute of Informatics also supports this conference and invited Jay Walsh, Head of Communications, to give the keynote speech. WCJ will cover a number of topics including academic research, wiki workshops, introduction of Wikimedia projects, language support and education.

The goal was to draw 150 participants, however due to overwhelming interest, 180 have already registered with more expected on the day of the conference. As a volunteer organizer, I am sending my cheers to WCJ organizers from San Francisco. I hope this conference will create synergy among Japanese Wikimedians and who knows, Wikimania 2011 could take place in Tokyo.

Naoko Komura

We’re excited to learn today that the Webby Awards have chosen Wikipedia as one of the ten most influential “Internet moments of the decade.” The timing is excellent as we’re now well-underway with our 6th annual fundraising drive.  It’s a great time to think about the extraordinary efforts of thousands of volunteers to make Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to make a donation to help ensure Wikipedia forever.

Alongside the other major hallmarks of a decade of the web, including protests in Iran, the 2008 presidential election, the expansion of craigslist, and the debut of the iPhone, Wikipedia is profiled – highlighting early beginnings in 2001 with 20,000 articles and 18 languages to its status today as a top-five web property used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Thanks to the Webby’s for such esteemed recognition, and congrats to the other big projects and story-makers of the year. Here’s to another big decade of influencing the web and promoting free knowledge!

Jay Walsh, Head of communications

Maybe you’ve been editing Wikipedia for years. Or maybe you made your first edit a few days ago. Whatever your experience, you likely know at least one central fact about editing – that it can be difficult for newcomers to master the skills necessary for contributing to Wikipedia.

We want to change that, and we need your help. That’s why Wikimedia is kicking off a new project, the Bookshelf Project, developed to extend the reach and improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by increasing participation. We’re designing the Bookshelf Project to create a core set of public outreach materials designed to recruit new, high-value Wikipedia contributors. The idea is that by increasing potential contributor awareness, fostering excitement, and providing the training tools new editors need to get started, we’ll draw many more new editors than we do today. And we believe recruiting new high-value contributors to Wikipedia will necessarily increase the usefulness and quality of our encyclopedia.

Now we already know that many Wikipedia readers have never thought about editing the encyclopedia – even though there’s lots of information available about how to do so. Our goal is to reach out to those editors more actively – both to make them feel welcome and give them a great set of starting tools. We hope to seed the knowledge and enthusiasm about contributing to Wikipedia in such a way that it propagates itself.

We have lots of good reasons to believe this dream is achievable. Here’s one reason: we know anecdotally how easy it can be to inspire someone to edit and to share knowledge about editing. For example, during recent user testing for the Usability project, we interviewed a woman who uses Wikipedia daily, mainly to help her daughter with homework. She is an avid fan but had never edited. During the testing, she edited for the first time and immediately became excited about the possibilities of sharing what she knows and loves with others. She understood and was eager to implement Wikipedia’s core tenets of neutrality and verifiability. And she was eager to go home, share her excitement and recruit others to the effort.

Now, we can’t do one-on-one interviews with every possible new editor. But stories like this one suggest that we can leverage our experience with a few editors in ways that will benefit many more potential contributors. And that is the essence of the Bookshelf materials we plan to develop with your help.

We also plan to tap educational resources, since we know Wikipedia is a fact of life in many educational situations, usually as a reference tool. The Bookshelf Project will support additional educational applications by providing model lesson plans to show secondary school teachers and university professors how they can use writing, editing and collaboration in Wikipedia as core curriculum activities. In developing the Bookshelf Educational materials, we will work with subject matter experts to ensure the materials are relevant and applicable.

The Bookshelf Project will include materials to help journalists and other communications professionals do their jobs more easily, including techniques and information to help them be sure the information they use and the copy they write is accurate and up to date.

The Bookshelf materials will be developed in English and will be designed for translation, adaptation and use by volunteers, chapters and educational institutions such as schools and universities. We will use our new Outreach Wiki for the Bookshelf Project. This will be our place to give updates on the project and to get community feedback. There are lots of opportunities to help out, from acting as subject matter experts, to reviewing, and translation and localization.

We look forward to working together with our community on this initiative. If you’ve been in any way successful as a Wikipedia editor, we would value your input and feedback. There’s more than one way to contribute to Wikipedia’s success, but one major way to contribute has to be in the recruiting and training of new editors. The more we do to bring new, talented editors on board, the more comprehensive, reliable, and useful Wikipedia will be.

Marlita Kahn
Project Manager, Bookshelf Project

Our build/design friends from Because We Can over in Oakland have done some great work for us over the past two years – including some nice entry-way desks, tables, and advice on how to make our humble space look nice.  They’re also an open company that blazes a trail in using open-source software and providing open-source designs. But recently they finished a particularly special, signature production job for us, our brand new Wikipedia globe sign, now hanging in our offices at 149 New Montgomery in San Francisco.

Jeffrey and Jillian have put together a nice blog post that provides a detailed run-through on how they lovingly crafted the sign using their in-shop CNC robot and meticulous hand-painting.  It brings our new space together in an exciting way, and yes – if you walk right up, not only does it glow, but you can help piece together that magnificent globe.

We’ll have more news to share about the Wikipedia puzzle globe in the coming weeks, but for now we’re happy to be able to share the inside scoop on how this lovely sign came together.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Earlier today, English Wikinews adopted the usability beta as a default interface. The usability team is thrilled that en.wikinews community has reached the consensus to be the first adopter of the usability beta as default. We will continue enhancing the interface to simplify and make it easy to navigate and edit.  Our sincere appreciation goes to the entire en.wikinews community for embracing our work. It is a great day for the usability team. We feel blessed.

Naoko Komura on behalf of the entire usability team
Program Manager, Usability Initiative

It’s not far from the old home, but it’s almost three times as big and can very comfortably hold the 28 (and growing!) local Wikimedia Foundation staff. Our new offices at 149 New Montgomery, just south of Market street in San Francisco have very quickly become the new home base for the small group that keeps the Wikimedia Foundation alive and kicking.

Our new offices span the entire third floor of this grand old office building on the little New Montgomery street, immediately across from the impressive (though currently completely abandoned) Pacific Bell headquarters.  With exposed brick, funky (and practical!) earthquake reinforcement bracing, exposed duct work and miles of ethernet cables, and the biggest, brightest windows you could possible ask for – it now feels like Wikimedia has found a true home – and there’s still some room to expand!

We’ll spend the first few months feeling out the space, moving furniture around and figuring out the best way to arrange work groups.  For now our tech and usability team sits on the west side of the space while fundraising, strategy, legal, communications, and administration rest on the east side. We also have an unusually large rack-space room in the back of the office, which for the time being will host our email and file-servers… but who knows what the future will bring.

The show-stopper in our new space is a custom-built Wikipedia globe sign by our friends at Because We Can, a custom build shop in Oakland, CA.  They’re also building us some economical and high quality rolling white boards that we’ll roll around the space to dry-erase collaborate ourselves into oblivion.  We’ll have more to say about this stunning sign latter on this week, including some secret features.

Right now almost all Wikimedia staff have converged on this location, including our previously displaced usability team.  Several staff still work remotely, but everyone was in town last week for our recent all-staff meeting.

We hope to have some guests come by the office soon, and we’ll look forward to Wikipedians passing through who can sign our guest list and see how things work from the inside out.  For more photos check out the category on the Wikimedia Commons.  If you pass through, be sure to tag and add your own shots.

Jay Walsh
Communications