Adam Evans’ photo of the Andromeda Galaxy, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day for 15 December 2012

For photography enthusiast Adam Evans, the true allure in capturing an image lies in shooting upwards. Evans, who works at Google Maps, said that his interest and education in aerial and satellite mapping is related to what he calls his “astronomy hobby.”

“Mapping cameras point downward from aircraft or satellites, and astrophotography cameras point upwards from earth to space,” he said. “A lot of the techniques and challenges are similar, such as dealing with the atmosphere’s effects.”

Evans said his passion for astrophotography began in 2006, when he got into telescopes. “Astrophotography is kind of like time travel,” Evans explained. “It lets us look deep into the past. We’re seeing the potential birthplace of new stars in a distant galaxy[,] but it’s all taking place millions of years ago!”

Evans’ stunning photo of the Andromeda Galaxy is the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day for 15 December 2012. The image is particularly special to him and required combining multiple long exposures with a sensitive camera in order to capture the distant galaxy’s faint starlight. And yet, the difficulties of photographing the Andromeda Galaxy are just one of the many challenges when it comes to astrophotography.

“Deep sky astrophotography [is] somewhat tricky,” he said. “By opening the shutter for such a long time, we need to compensate for the rotation of the Earth, and for the effects of light pollution in the night sky.  By using special filters, we can see photons that the human eye is not sensitive to, such as the glowing hydrogen gas clouds (nebulae) that are presently giving birth to new stars in that distant galaxy.” In the photo of Andromeda, these gas clouds are shown as a bright pink hue.

Evans describes himself as “a big believer in open sharing of images” on Wikimedia Commons and elsewhere. “One of the lesser-known benefits of…Commons is the creation of a large database of useful reference images,” Evans said. “The amateur astrophotography community has assisted professional and research astronomy by openly sharing their images. [They’re] helping to catalog a huge swath of sky that is difficult to cover regularly with specialized research telescopes.”

Evans hopes that his images will inspire those who see them to attempt to understand the universe. “I hope that others…will be as humbled as I am by the immensity of space,” he said. Evans has a similar aspiration for his newborn daughter, whom he hopes will one day share his love for the stars.

You can see more of Evans’ astrophotography here.

Zoe Bernard, Communications Intern

(This video is part of a series for this year’s Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser. You can support Wikipedia and free knowledge by contributing at donate.wikimedia.org. You can also view this video on Youtube.)

Gideon Digby has climbed fences, crossed swollen creeks, hiked through the rain and has driven over a thousand miles – all in the pursuit of photos to upload to Wikimedia Commons.

Gideon is a photographer by profession and he shoots flowers as a hobby in his native region of Western Australia, which is home to more than 30,000 unique species of plants. “It’s going to take years to shoot every one, and that’s part of the challenge, getting in and finding some of those flowers when they’re in season,” he said. “A lot of them are endangered, a lot of them are in restricted areas where you’re not supposed to go and a lot of them you don’t know a physical location, so you’ve got to work that out yourself.”

Many of these elusive blooms have led Gideon on adventures deep into the untamed Australian Outback. “Friends and family think I’m a bit crazy,” he admitted with a chuckle. And yet, it is this particular brand of craziness which has benefited and refined the pages of Wikimedia Commons, where he has contributed over 2,000 photos in the past seven years.

Like many stories in Gideon’s life, his involvement with Wikipedia began with a flower. In this case, the flower in question was the Kangaroo Paw. He stumbled across the Wikipedia entry for the Kangaroo Paw in 2005, back when the article was a single sentence. “It says, ‘This is the floral emblem of Western Australia’ or something and that’s it,” he said. “I knew more about the flower than what was there and I saw the little button at the top that said ‘edit this page,’ so I started editing.”

For Gideon, Wikimedia Commons provided an intriguing way to share his photos with the world.  Many of the other photographic forums he contributed to lacked the context he felt necessary to detail the unique qualities of the plants he captured. On Wikipedia, he could upload photos and provide editorial information to contextualize the plants.

“For photographers,” Gideon said, “[Wikipedia] is a fantastic world. You can pick and choose what you release. You can change subjects. You can go read an article about something and say, ‘Oh, I know where that is. That’s only down the road. I’m going to take a drive and take some photos.’ It challenges you.”

Profile by Zoe Bernard, Communications Intern
Interview by Jonathan Curiel, Development Communications Manager 

This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

Yuri Leite

“I think that the knowledge produced by high-qualified college students should be available to anyone,” Professor Yuri Leite says. That’s why he has encouraged his biology students at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo in Vitória, Brazil, to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their course assignments.

The idea came to him one day in 2009, when he was coordinating a graduate level seminar on the Charles Darwin book “The Origin of Species.” Each week, the class discussed a chapter of the book and improved the article on the Portuguese Wikipedia about Darwin’s book as they went along. Before Yuri’s class began work, the article was what’s known as a stub — a short article without much content. By the end of the term, his class had transformed the article, with extensive descriptions of each chapter.

“I think it is a waste of time, energy, knowledge, and often paper to have highly skilled undergraduate or graduate students write term papers that will be read only by the teacher and sometimes a TA, and will eventually end up in the trash can,” Yuri says.

He had always been interested in using the Internet as a teaching tool. As a teaching assistant at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1990s, Yuri found the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web and Berkeley’s Understanding Evolution portals inspirational.

A beautiful view of Vitória city, where Professor Yuri Leite teaches.

He started using Wikipedia in his undergraduate Evolution course since August 2011. The course is mandatory for all biology students, and Yuri has about 30 students enroll each term. He says it will only take a few years to have his students make hundreds of contributions to free, high-quality knowledge available in Portuguese about the topics. He also sees better learning for students with a Wikipedia assignment in comparison to a traditional term paper.

“I believe they learn more, especially regarding proper citation, and what is original research and what is not. Both of these concepts are very important in science,” he says. “Wikipedia does a great job in terms of defining what an encyclopedia is, and how one should write an article citing appropriate sources, and this is a very important skill for students.”

And Yuri says his students feel more responsibility to produce high-quality work because they know their writing will be available to anyone on Wikipedia. He’s excited about the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil, and he hopes that more professors will join the program and develop more teaching resources to stimulate the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. In fact, professor Aureo Banhos, one of his former biology students, has joined the program through an open call Wikimedia Foundation made in Brazil for the second school term of 2012 and is excited to collaborate with Yuri.

“I love reading the assignments and feeling like my students made a significant contribution by posting high-quality information on the web,” Yuri says.

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Read the rest of this entry »

Ei kannata mennä merta edemmäs kalaan. —a Finnish proverb

The Translate extension, a central piece in the puzzle that makes Wikipedia and the community around it massively multilingual, is getting a major overhaul.

“Translate”, as it’s commonly called, powers the translation of Wikipedia’s software, announcements, reports and fundraising banners, and of other sites and software projects. It focuses on making the translators’ work easy, efficient and, if possible, fun. The software gets frequent under-the-hood updates, and now the time has come for a major overhaul of its most visible part: the translation user interface.

Arun Ganesh and Pau Giner, from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team, have studied the current translation workflow by testing the software and interviewing translators. They drafted new interface ideas and tested experimental designs with users who speak different languages and have different levels of experience with the translation functionality.

In the team’s thirtieth two-week coding sprint, which ended last Tuesday, two major components of the overhaul have taken shape: the message group selector and the list of translatable messages.

The Message group selector. Message groups are groups of related translatable messages: a software project, a multilingual blog post or announcement, etc.

The group selector helps a translator find a project to translate using a tree-like structure of groups and sub-groups. Every project shows the completeness of the translation using a colorful progress bar. For quick and easy access to the projects that interest the translator, there’s a tab that shows recently used projects, and a responsive search function.

Listing of translatable interface message for the Visual Editor. Some messages are translated to French and some need review.

The list of strings to translate has been redesigned to improve clarity, making it easier to scan and distinguish between messages that are translated, untranslated and need to be updated (“fuzzy”).

The development of the improved user experience continues. In the next sprints, the team will complete these features and add new ones, such as an improved sign-up process and better search. Usability testing efforts will continue to ensure that the new designs provide an improved experience. If you are interested in trying the new translation tools, please volunteer for our usability testing sessions.

Other ways to connect with the Language Engineering team:

• Pau Giner and I will present on multilingual user testing and internationalization “dos and don’ts” in the live broadcast Wikimedia Open Tech Chat on Thursday, December 13 at 20:30 UTC.
• We’ll hold IRC Office Hours on Wednesday, December 17 at 17:30 UTC. Topics of discussion will be the translation user experience improvements, Universal Language Selector and general Q&A.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

Yesterday we launched an alpha, opt-in version of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia. This will let editors create and modify real articles visually, using a new system where the articles they edit will look the same as when you read them, and their changes show up as they type enter them — like writing a document in a word processor.

Why launch now?

We want our community of existing editors to get an idea of what the VisualEditor will look like in the “real world” and start to give us feedback about how well it integrates with how they edit right now. We also want to get their thoughts on what aspects should be priorities in the coming months.

The editor is at an early stage and is still missing significant functions, which we will address in the coming months. Because of this, we are mostly looking for feedback from experienced editors at this point, because the alpha VisualEditor is insufficient to really give them a proper experience of editing. We don’t want to promise an easier editing experience to new editors before it is ready.

As we develop improvements, they will be pushed every two weeks to the wikis, allowing you to give us feedback as we go, and tell us what you want us to work on next.

How can I try it out?

The VisualEditor is now available to all logged-in accounts on the English Wikipedia as a new preference, switched off by default. If you go to your “Preferences” screen and click into the “Editing” section, it will have an option labelled “Enable VisualEditor.”

Once enabled, for each article you can edit, you will get a second editor tab labelled “VisualEditor” next to the “Edit” tab. If you click this, after a little pause you will enter the VisualEditor. From here, you can play around, edit and save real articles and get an idea of what it will be like when complete.

At this early stage in our development, we recommend that after saving any edits, you check whether they broke anything. All edits made with the VisualEditor will show up in articles’ history tabs with a “VisualEditor” tag next to them, so you can track what is happening.

We would love your feedback on what we have done so far — whether it’s a problem you discovered, an aspect that you find confusing, what area you think we should work on next, or anything else, please do let us know.

James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor and Parsoid

(This video is part of a series for this year’s Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser. You can support Wikipedia and free knowledge by contributing at donate.wikimedia.org. You can also view this video on Youtube.)

“When I write, I learn at the same time, and learning is what interests me in life,” said Gereon Kalkuhl, an active contributor and administrator on the German Wikipedia. Kalkuhl also contributes to the English, Portuguese, Polish, and Swedish language sites. Suffice it to say his background in translating comes in quite handy.

From insects to mayors to chess players, the 44-year old German keeps adding to the sum of all human knowledge, one edit at a time. Active since 2006, Kalkuhl was surprised at the amount of collaboration and discussion with other Wikipedia editors when he started contributing.

“When you engage a certain topic, other people will contact you, people that share the same passion for the subject matter,” Kalkuhl explained. “I found this very nice. When I was writing articles on insects, professors of entomology were approaching me, and then the knowledge starts to go back and forth. It’s really amazing when you meet someone halfway around the world who is as invested and interested in the same subject as you and you get to collaborate with them.”

“What they all have in common is they’re curious people. Not only that, they want to share this knowledge,” he added.

Kalkuhl feels that the average person might appreciate Wikipedia more if they knew about the behind-the-scenes machinations that allow the site to thrive. When he started out, he said he had no idea. Like many people, Kalkuhl assumed a cadre of computer programmers and, well, not “normal people,” were the ones helping to keep Wikipedia a trusted source of knowledge.

“Almost everybody uses Wikipedia. They might complain about it, they might even hate it, but they still end up using it. So people should be interested in how it works,” he said. “They would probably gain more of an appreciation for what Wikipedia actually is and how it functions so well. One thing that most people are not aware of is that there’s very active quality control. People are really scanning what new articles come up, and if it doesn’t reach a certain quality requirement of what an article is supposed to look like, they’re listing it, they’re tagging it, or they’re trying to improve it.”

Like anything else, Wikipedia isn’t perfect. However, Kalkuhl illustrates that the perfect should never be the enemy of the good, especially when it comes to a free online encyclopedia.

“Every social media platform has trolls and folks who just want to disturb the peace. Sometimes drastic measures must be taken and these people have to be blocked from using Wikipedia. But that’s the price we pay for an open lexicon where everybody can contribute,” he said. “Wikipedia is an amazing model—volunteers are contributing and it’s working—people are doing it. They’re willing to spend time and make it better for everyone because it’s really in our best interest to share this knowledge with everybody on the planet.”

Perhaps Kalkuhl can appreciate what goes on behind the scenes of Wikipedia a bit more because of another one of his passions: he has been an extra in 50 movies, working with the likes of David Cronenberg and Tom Tykwer.

“It’s not so special,” he said humbly. “I’m just an extra, you know, but it’s fun to work for a couple of days on a set and see how the directors and actors work. I find the whole thing fascinating because you see so many movies, but when you see how it’s actually done, you get a much deeper understanding of the film. Sometimes it’s like a holiday in time too—depending on the movie you can pretend to be in the 1870s and you’re wearing a costume and the atmosphere of that time is all around you—it’s so much fun!”

Profile by Darrin Fox, Communications Intern
Interview by Victor Grigas, Visual Storyteller

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for November 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

New HTML5 video player

A new video player was enabled on Wikipedia and its sister sites, promising to bring free educational videos to more people, on more devices, in more languages. The player is the same HTML5 player used in the Kaltura open-source video platform. Its many new features include advanced support for subtitles, support for the royalty-free WebM video format, and server-side transcoding, i.e. the ability to convert from one video format to another, in order to deliver the appropriate video stream to the user depending on their bandwidth and the size of the player.

Usability testing of the new translation interface at the Bangalore DevCamp 2012

Developer meetup and language summit in India

On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India. The Engineering DevCamp focused on language support, development for mobile devices, and user interaction and user experience design (UI/UX). More than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators attended the event. It was preceded by an Open-Source language summit that the Foundation organized together with Red Hat in Pune, India.

Fundraiser launch

The Foundation’s ninth annual online fundraiser officially launched on November 27, 2012 and raised a record breaking $2.3 million in a single day: a 59% increase over our biggest day in 2011. See the Fundraiser Statistics page for a view comparing this year to previous years. Banner design progressed from last year’s “Jimmy appeal” ([1]) to variations on a new “Facts banner” ([2], [3], and [4]) which are more oriented towards informing users about the Wikimedia Foundation.

Due to the very successful start, it was decided to show banners only in the following five English-speaking countries through December 31: US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand (in addition to the banners for fundraising chapters). The fundraiser will be re-launched in all remaining countries in the spring of 2013, with improved translations.

Proposed new logo for Wikivoyage

Beta launch of Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage, the project to create a free world travel guide which anyone can edit, launched on Wikimedia Foundation servers on November 10, migrating text content and accounts from the old servers run by the Wikivoyage Association. The community is working on the review and transfer of media files, and the site remains in “beta” until this and other cleanup tasks are completed.

Data and Trends

Read the rest of this entry »

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of November (December 6, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for October:

488.4 million (+2.84% compared with September; +2.46% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)

Page requests for November:

20.3 billion (+2.7% compared with October; +16.8% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for October 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,964 (-2.73% compared with September / +0.59% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for October 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of October 31, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of October 31, 2012

(Financial information is only available for October 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date October 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of October is $1.24MM vs plan of $0.85MM, approximately $396K or 47% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $5.36MM vs plan of $5.21MM, approximately $151K or 3% over plan.
• Expenses for the month of October is $2.53MM vs plan of $2.84MM, approximately $305K or 11% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and operating grants.
• Year-to-date expenses is $9.93MM vs plan of $11.52MM, approximately $1.59MM or 14% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and awards and grants.
• Cash position is $20.76MM as of October 31, 2012 which is approximately 5.92 months of expenses.

Highlights

New HTML5 video player

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“Live bird”, an illustration by Kim ‘Isarra’ Schoonover, one of Wikimedia’s interns for the Outreach Program for Women.

I’m glad to announce that Kim Schoonover, Mariya Miteva, Priyanka Nag, Sucheta Ghoshal, Teresa Cho and Valerie Juarez will join the MediaWiki community as full-time interns between January and March 2013. They have been selected as part of the FLOSS Outreach Program for Women, an initiative of the GNOME Foundation, with participation by several other free software projects: Deltacloud, Fedora, JBoss, Mozilla, Open Technology Institute, OpenITP, OpenStack, Subversion, Tor and Wikimedia. A total of 25 women have been selected in this edition.

Each MediaWiki intern will work on a specific project:

• Kim Schoonover (aka ‘Isarra’) is a Wikipedia contributor based in Colorado (USA) with an interest in user experience and design. She has contributed a few patches to MediaWiki projects already. She will work on design documents for Flow, the planned UI for user discussion pages, mentored by Brandon Harris and Heather Walls.
• Mariya Miteva is a Masters of Information Systems Student in New York (USA), although she is originally from Sofia (Bulgaria) and will conduct her internship from there. She will find MediaWiki vendors and define the best ways to work with them, and will also have a backlog of product management tasks. Her mentors are Sumana Harihareswara and James Forrester.
• Priyanka Nag is a Computer Science post-graduate student from Pune (Maharashtra, India). She will work in the documentation of noteworthy local templates, gadgets and styles used in various Wikimedia projects, mentored by Amir E. Aharoni.
• Sucheta Ghoshal is a Computer Science and Engineering student based in Kolkata (West Bengal, India), an active Wikipedia contributor and member of the Wikimedia Kolkata meetup. She will work on the productization of EtherEditor MediaWiki extension. She will be mentored by Mark Holmquist.
• Teresa Cho has double major in Computer Science and Economics and she lives in Redwood City (California, USA). Her project consists of developing a MediaWiki extension to interact with Git repositories, and is mentored by Sébastien Santoro.
• Valerie Juarez has a BS in Computer Science and she lives in Sour Lake (Texas, USA). She will help managing the bug reports, organize a couple of “Bug Days” and will develop a proposal for streamlining user feedback from multiple Wikimedia sources. She will be mentored by Andre Klapper and Quim Gil.

Our mentors assisted about 25 women interested in the MediaWiki community during the application process. From those, 10 submitted full applications, including a project proposal and a microtask completed as part of the submission. We were impressed by the quality of many submissions, but we couldn’t take more due to lack of related mentors and funding. We encourage all applicants to stay around in the MediaWiki community, since we have no doubt they can all become top contributors and have future opportunities.

In addition to the availability of specialized mentors and the quality of the proposals, our selection criteria took into account the diversity of profiles, origins and previous involvement in Wikimedia projects. We had a rather open process for submissions and selection of candidates that gave participants a chance to check other proposals, improve their own and receive public endorsements.

We wish a happy landing to our new interns and the best of luck in their projects! You’ll be hearing more from them over the next few months.

Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator

(This video is part of a series for this year’s Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser. You can support Wikipedia and free knowledge by contributing at donate.wikimedia.org. If you have trouble viewing the video below, try watching it here.)

Click to view a video of Adrianne Wadewitz discussing the Impact of Wikipedia.

When Adrianne Wadewitz first began editing Wikipedia as a graduate student at Indiana University, her professors warned her, “don’t tell anybody you’re doing that.”

Now, Wadewitz says, it’s completely different. “I’ve seen the evolution of Wikipedia in my own career.” In fact, her experience editing Wikipedia helped land her a job at Occidental College’s Center for Digital Learning and Research, where she teaches faculty members how to implement technology in their teaching and research methods.

Wadewitz began using Wikipedia in the classroom while teaching freshman English as an Indiana University graduate student. She said she developed a Wikipedia writing assignment in an effort to break down the traditional hierarchical professor/student relationship within college classrooms.

Wadewitz said using Wikipedia in the classroom introduced her students’ work to a larger audience. “The world was going to see what you wrote and it mattered what you wrote and how you wrote it, because millions of people were going to see it,” she said. “It really motivates students to write for the world, not just for their professor.”

Now, she recruits other professors to engage with Wikipedia in their own classrooms. “We want to show students how to use Wikipedia productively. Banning Wikipedia from the classroom is completely ineffective because students are going to use it all the time anyway.”

This is a fact that Wadewitz knows all too well. One semester, one of her students chose to write a report on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. When Wadewitz reviewed the paper, she found that “whole swaths of the paper were plagiarized from the Wikipedia article I wrote on Mary Shelley. So, I got to write in the margin, ‘I know this is plagiarized from Wikipedia because I wrote it on Wikipedia.’”

Wadewitz believes that exposure to Wikipedia has a positive impact in the way we think about learning. “Whenever I have students put together an article or add material to an article, I have them think about…what it mean[s] to construct an article out of a variety of sources,” she said.

For her, the online encyclopedia is compelling us to reevaluate the way we see knowledge.  “[Wikipedia] doesn’t take its legitimacy from who is writing. It takes its legitimacy from the information that they add, and where they got that information,” she said. “It’s a totally different way of thinking about information.”

Profile by Zoe Bernard, Communications Intern
Interviews by Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager and Victor Grigas, Visual Storyteller