Hi folks,
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ve published two new stories on the Wikimedia Blog, for your enjoyment:
Love on the wikis
Here are our favorite articles and images about love, collectively hand-picked by community members.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/love-on-the-wikis/
A WikiLove story
How two Wikipedians fell in love while volunteering in Israel, thanks to a shared passion for knowledge.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/wikilove-story/
Many thanks to everyone who contributed to our community-curated love collection! All your fine suggestions broadened our perspectives about love. Together, we found some really well-written, factual and nuanced articles, as well as many humorous, dramatic or beautiful images, which gave us a better understanding about love and why it matters.
What do you think about this curation experiment? Did you learn anything new? Should we do it again? If so, what themes should we focus on next? Please chime in the comments of the first story above, with your ideas and suggestions.
We hope that collaborations like these can help us discover new ways to share useful information, combining the wikis, our blog and social media.
Thanks again for sharing the love — and Happy Valentine's Day to all Wikimedians!
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Movement Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Rachel diCerbo wrote:
>...
> Community Engagement is continuously considering effective ways of
> interacting with you around product development and would love your
> suggestions. What kinds of communications from WMF would you like to see?
Please volunteer to co-mentor my GSoC proposal:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review
There is absolutely no way I can possibly do this without a co-mentor
from the WMF or WEF. It's not a hard task, and one of the major
benefits I just learned yesterday is a robust implementation of
per-word text attribution, which amazingly still hasn't been available
to the wider community in a way that handles reverted blanking and
text moves since WikiTrust went offline. Maribel Acosta, Fabian
Floeck, and Andriy Rodchenko did a suitable replacement algorithm in
2013, but it hasn't been folded back into the Wikimedia Utilities
distribution.
Please, WMF engineering staff, remember 2.5 years ago when I was
literally the only one publicly arguing that you should be paid market
rate for tech workers instead of lower nonprofit worker salaries? I
took so much public abuse and scorn for that for over a year until it
happened. Please consider giving back by co-mentoring the accuracy
review GSoC proposal. It shouldn't take more than a few hours per
week over the summer.
Best regards,
James Salsman
Dear All,
The Board of Directory in WMHK is as follows starting from 1st September
2015.
President : Rover WONG
Chief Executive Officer : Tango CHAN
Secretary : Vincent TSUI
Treasurer : Raymond HUI
Director : Pak Yiu YICK
Director : Victor LI
Sorry for the late notice.
Rover WONG
President, Wikimedia Hong Kong
Hei ;)
These last months I have been visiting and living in several intentional
communities to learn and understand what works for me and what doesn't. If
done right, it is a great environment to have a simple life full of joy and
happiness.
I was wondering if anyone else in the WM movement is interested or has
experience with tech/open knowledge communities?
There is something like that in SF [1], but it seems to be more for profit
and not volunteer-run, which for me is a must.
Oh, btw, happy st valentine's. Love for all!
Micru
[1] http://bit-post.com/20mission-co-living-space-for-tech-talents/
Dear Wikimedians,
We are changing our engineering processes to improve how we engage with you -- our valued contributors and editors -- around software development.
We are beginning with the collaborative buildout and deployment of VisualEditor. We are moving community engagement processes and product decisions into earlier stages of development, and making them iterative. In a perfect world this process would start prior to feature development, but in this case VisualEditor is already in-flight, so your participation now is critical. With your participation, we can work together to ensure this new process works.
In this new process, we commit to:
• Collectively identify success criteria for each target audience, from new editors (simple feature set) to expert editors (complex feature set).
• Ensure success criteria represents the quantified and qualified goals. The feature will only be shipped when the success criteria is met.
• Enable the feature for only portions of specific audiences that would best benefit (a process known as “incremental roll-out”) at a time.
• Triage and prioritize all bugs and feature requests on a weekly basis to ensure they are addressed in a timely fashion. Publicly post responses, assessment, and target implementations. This will replace the RFP process and ensure we are tracking on all requested features efficiently.
How you can engage:
• Report bugs or enhancement requests in Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/visualeditor/
• Join any of the weekly triage meetings to nominate a release blocker. Please see the instructions at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:VisualEditor/Portal
• Participate in development. You can find the team on IRC in the #mediawiki-visualeditor channel on irc.freenode.net.
We are excited to get this long-standing feature to the level of quality and success we all want and need. It is a collective effort. You are not only a stakeholder, but an active contributor in this work. We want to all to be proud of the outcome. Please participate now.
All my best,
Damon
—
Damon Sicore
VP of Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
dsicore(a)wikimedia.org
This story is at once a personal one, but its products could affect
our whole movement. Thus I feel a duty to share it with you.
(Disclaimer: I am under the influence of sljivovica [1], which means
that my English syntax could betray me.
Also, keep in mind that one of the comments which I got after the
first AfroCrowd [2] session was that it's hard to follow me, as my
narration makes people sleepy. Besides that comment, I actually helped
on that occasion my fellow friend Milica to fell asleep. And I see
that as one of my contributions to the better world: If my narration
helps people to fell asleep, then it's at least more natural
medication than sleeping pills.
So, brace yourselves! If you really want to read my whole email --
which I warmly suggest :D --, it's good idea to read it in bed,
immediately before you want to sleep.)
* * *
Back to 1985, as 12 years old boy, I got my first computer. It was
Schneider [3] branded version of Amstrad CPC 664 [4]. Although I was
fascinated by computers earlier, that was the real beginning of my
geekness. I still remember my first programs in Locomotive Basic.
But, during my high school years, I decided that I definitely don't
want to study anything which requires mathematics. So, I wanted to
study world literature, but was enough successful just to enter the
course of Serbian language and literature.
Almost immediately after I started my studies, I realized that I am
much more interested in grammar than literature and my divergence from
my initial idea became wider as time was passing.
It actually culminated with starting studies in theoretical physics.
However, I realized then that there are "studies" and *studies*.
Theoretical physics obviously belongs to the real ones. So, I
abandoned it and went back to my linguistics "studies"...
But the difference between "science" and *science* made quite a big
influence on me. During my first and the only year of studying
theoretical physics, I realized that all social sciences are on the
level of pre-Newton physics. And linguistics is probably the best of
the social sciences.
So, I wanted to fix that. I started to be interested in all the fields
which intended to make linguistics more scientific. (All my interests
were so diverse, that I could write another long story for each of
them, so I'll avoid all of them except the most relevant one.) At the
end I settled with formal/computational linguistics. And I got full
support of my linguistics professors. The reason why I got such
support has become much more clear to me during the next decade:
Basically, I was the only student interested in that.
I went to the Computational Center of the Faculty for Electrical
Engineering in 1995 and the new phase of my life began. Thanks to that
institution and people around it, instead of working on formal
linguistics issues, I became more and more interested in system
administration. Speaking from today's perspective, system
administration is my profession, while linguistics is my hobby.
In 1999 the third of my journeys began. While reading documentation,
at the time when I could have been easily become a collateral damage
of the bombs of the sole superpower, I was bizarrely but genuinely
interested in the fact that GNU GPL can't be realistically implemented
into the jurisdiction of my country as it wasn't localized. Thus I
sent an email to licenses(a)gnu.org and one person responded to me. Just
years later I realized who is RMS.
Between 1999 and 2003 I was a bit depressed because I knew that free
software is not possible without free knowledge. Then I found
Wikipedia and my fourth journey started. (I am still aware that free
knowledge is not possible without free and just society and that free
and just society is not possible without free love. But I didn't come
yet to the position to work on that more systematically.)
With one year of absence, I am a member of the Language committee
since 2008. During the first years of my duty I deeply believed that
there are people who care about the global language diversity in
general and systematic way. And I was quite disappointed to realize
that nobody actually cares about them in that way.
So, for a long time I was thinking that the duty of Wikimedia movement
is to take that responsibility.
Back to the present...
The project [5] of starting cooperation with Matica srpska [6] has
been formally approved by WMF. And that's the crossroads of my five
journeys: computers, Serbian language, free software, Wikipedia and
one more.
The last one is the most important one. I see this project not just as
a local initiative, but as the beginning of one initiative which only
Wikimedia movement could achieve. Yes, it's about the idea that every
language which has Wikipedia has a chance to survive. And this project
will make the foundations for making that idea reality. To be able to
tackle that issue, we have to have the software and the movement
willing to work on it. And I am sure that we'll get both during the
duration of the project.
That doesn't mean that it will be successful just thanks to the work
of the core team of this project. It requires wide participation of
all of you, all of us. So, please, join us! You have this thread and
my email and there is no valid excuse to wait.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slivovitz
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/AfroCrowd
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Rundfunkwerke_AG
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC#CPC664
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets…
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matica_srpska
Hi all,
(Pardon the cross-posting)
Starting today, we want to show Wikimedia some love in a very special way:
talking about diversity! [1]
Diversity in Wikimedia projects is key to achieve our shared vision: that
anyone can contribute in the sum of all knowledge. We know many efforts
have been made to bridge many gaps.
Have you:
* preserved your cultural or national history through photo contests and
editing events?
* worked to enrich a particular language or cultural group on Wikimedia?
* studied diversity issues in online communities?
_What have you learned when trying to encourage diversity on Wikimedia?_
The Learning and Evaluation team invites all community members to share
what they know about bringing diversity on Wikimedia projects. This
initiative seeks to create a body of knowledge around diversity outcomes
for events, projects and programs, in a way to give support to
Grantmaking’s Inspire Campaign (coming up the first week of March). If you
worked to make Wikimedia projects more diverse, in content or community, what
has worked for you? what has not worked? Share what you know with the world!
There are multiple ways to engage:
1. Share a problem
2. Share a solution
3. Endorse problems and solutions to vote them up in importance
4. Writing a Learning Pattern (that addresses any of the problems/solutions
shared)
We will be awarding our brand new L&E Barnstars[2] to contributors during
this special campaign =)
Visit the campaign page [1] to contribute and discuss, and if you are
twitter user, use #ILoveDiversity to promote the campaign for others to
participate.
Happy editing!
*María Cruz * \\ Community Coordinator, PE&D Team \\ Wikimedia Foundation,
Inc.
mcruz(a)wikimedia.org | : @marianarra_ <https://twitter.com/marianarra_>
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns/Project/Diversity_…
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Learning_and_Evaluation_barnsta…
[X-posted announcement]
Hello,
The next monthly IRC office hour of the WMF Language Engineering team will
be on February 18, 2015 (Wednesday) at 1300 UTC on #wikimedia-office.
Please note that for this instance the session has been set to a much
earlier hour.
We will be taking questions and discussing about our ongoing projects,
particularly the recent activation of Content Translation as a beta feature
on several Wikipedias[1]. We’d love to hear comments, suggestions and any
feedback that will help us make this tool better.
Please see below to check local time and event details. Logs from our
earlier office hours are available at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Language_Engineering
Thanks
Runa
[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/20/try-content-translation/
Monthly IRC Office Hour:
==================
# Date: February 18, 2015 (Wednesday)
# Time: 1300 UTC (Check local time:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20150218T1300)
# IRC channel: #wikimedia-office
# Agenda:
1. Ongoing projects - Content Translation beta feature
2. Q & A (Questions can be sent to me ahead of the event)
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi folks,
Can you help us pick great articles and images about love for Valentine’s Day?
We’ve received a lot of great community suggestions since this campaign started last week -- and are particularly grateful to Pine, Nemo, Fae, Geni and other community members for their generous contributions. :)
We now invite you to add your +1’s for suggestions you think are the most insightful:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Love_on_the_wikis
Simply sign your name next to your favorite suggestions, for sharing with a wide audience on Friday.
And we could still use a few more articles, quotes, sounds and videos, if you have any last-minute suggestions.
We welcome your contributions until the end of today, at midnight PST. Tomorrow, we will prepare a blog post with our top picks, based on community and team feedback — and publish it on the Wikimedia Blog and on social media, on Friday -- just in time for Valentine’s day.
As a result of this experiment, we may find new ways to curate and share information on specific themes, combining the wikis, our blog and social media.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this community-created love collection!
Regards as ever,
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Movement Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)