The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the national public broadcaster, turns 80 this year. To celebrate it has launched a new website called “80 Days That Changed Our Lives“, giving 80 pieces of audio visual content from the ABC archives a new lease on life. Today, the ABC has also announced that it has gone a step further by releasing some of these historical news reports to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons free license. This release of highly encyclopedic audiovisual history is not only a first for Australia, it is a first for Wikimedia.

1940s Mobile studio caravan, provided by the ABC

While this is the first collection of broadcast “packaged” footage released to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, the leader in the field for several years has been Al Jazeera who have been sharing some of their contemporary footage on their own Creative Commons portal. With their project Open Beelden the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision have also shared online many historical newsreels that have acquired. Both of these collections have since been copied into Wikimedia Commons. The ABC is also following in the footsteps of Radio y Televisión Argentina who have previously released some of their archival recordings and parliamentary speeches.

You can view the collection of files on Wikimedia Commons, which all available to use, remix and share, at Category: Files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the important pieces of Australian history that now have freely licensed multimedia for the first time include:

• The “Tampa affair” (2001)
• The “Waterfront dispute” (1998)
• The release of Lindy Chaimberlain from prison (1986)
• The floating of the currency (1983)
• The introduction of World Series Cricket (1977)
• Intriguingly, an interview with Arthur C. Clarke predicting the Internet in 1974.
• and, the first ever broadcast from ABC Television (1956).

You can check where these files are already being used within Wikipedia articles on the toolserver project. You can also read the press release by the ABC about this project and also the blogpost by Creative Commons Australia (which is hosted by CCi).

As a non-profit operated collection of educational and freely-licensed media,  and as the repository that serves the 280+ languages editions of Wikipedia, we believe that Wikimedia Commons is a perfect place for broadcasters and other GLAMs to share their archival content. Hopefully this release from the Australian public broadcaster will be the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia community,  and encourage other broadcasters – especially those that are publicly funded – to join us.

Sincerely,
Liam Wyatt / Wittylama – Project officer, ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi)

Wikipedians at the San Francisco WikiWomen's History Edit-a-thon. Photo: Matthew Roth CC-BY-SA

Wikimedians are gathering all around the world this month in honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. At meet-ups, workshops and edit-a-thons, in-person and online, new editors are joining with seasoned Wikipedians to improve coverage related to women’s history and encourage more women to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Supporting social editing events like this is one way we hope to narrow the Wikipedia gender gap and double women’s participation on Wikimedia projects by 2015.

This past Saturday, the Wikimedia Foundation and partners at the Ada Initiative and OCLC  hosted the San Francisco WikiWomen’s History Edit-a-thon at the WMF office in San Francisco. Many of the 40 attendees were women, and many had never edited Wikipedia before. We sat around tables with laptops and reference books,  sandwiches and coffee in hand, adding and improving content in the world’s largest repository of knowledge. We laughed and talked while a few kids with barnstar buttons played nearby.  And in four hours, we created 12 new accounts, started 10 articles, and improved over 20 more.  Overall, it was an incredibly fun and successful event!

In pairs and small groups, experienced Wikipedians partnered with attendees who had never before used wiki markup, nor heard of a talk page. In no time, they were confidently improving Wikipedia articles on topics like Sexism, Peggy Yu, and the Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation. One group waded into the world of copy-editing, fixing spelling errors and punctuation problems in articles on everything from the JFK assassination conspiracy theories to Buddhist descriptions of Brahmans from early texts. Others edited entries in Wiktionary and Commons.
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This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

Em Português:

A Wikipédia lusófona é um dos dez maiores projetos da Wikipédia em número de artigos, e o Brasil, lar do maior número de editores em português da Wikipédia, é uma das principais regiões estratégicas na mira do departamento de Desenvolvimento Global. Mas, enquanto o afluxo de novos colaboradores e membros da comunidade de núcleo manteve-se relativamente estável ao longo dos anos, o número de wikipedistas novos muito ativos no projeto experimentou um declínio preocupante.

Brazilian Wikipedians at a meetup in São Paulo. Photo: Victor Grigas, CC-BY-SA

No início de março, funcionários do Departamento de Comunidades da Fundação Wikimedia viajaram ao Brasil para aprender mais sobre os desafios de projetar o crescimento e começar a discutir soluções que possam ser realizadas pela comunidade. A eles juntou-se Oona Castro, recém-contratada Diretora Nacional de Programas da Fundação Wikimedia no país.

Visitamos quatro cidades: São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, onde já havia uma cultura extensa de encontros, e também Curitiba e Natal, onde encontros nunca tinham acontecido antes. No decorrer de duas semanas, reunimos dezenas de editores para troca de conhecimento, discussões e debates.

Os wikipedistas que participaram desses encontros representam todas as esferas de nossa comunidade, desde novos colaboradores que acabaram de fazer sua primeira edição até veteranos que ajudaram a comunidade a crescer desde os primeiros dias de sua existência. Nossos participantes incluíram estudantes universitários animados em usar a Wikipédia em sala de aula, acadêmicos que se envolveram recentemente em edição, autores de milhares de artigos, desenvolvedores de interwikis e militantes antivandalismo, e até mesmo o detentor do recorde mundial da maior coleção de garrafas de cachaça! Muitos nunca tinham ido a um encontro ou conhecido outros wikipedistas.

Discutimos temas que são importantes para todas as comunidades Wikipédia, incluindo como acolher e orientar os recém-chegados sem perder qualidade, como equilibrar política e transparência e como resolver conflitos tanto no âmbito individual quanto em nível de projeto. Também abordamos as coisas que tornam a Wikipédia lusófona única, como ter editores de todos os países lusófonos (e não apenas o Brasil) e como localizar melhor tecnologia e documentação. Nossas anotações de todos os encontros, em português e inglês, podem ser encontradas na Esplanada, o principal espaço de discussão da comunidade da Wikipédia lusófona. Ao disponibilizar as anotações para toda a comunidade, esperamos desencadear mais discussões na internet e fora dela sobre o bem-estar da comunidade e melhorias lideradas por editores da Wikipédia lusófona.

Queremos agradecer a todos que nos ajudaram a organizar estes encontros e àqueles que vieram compartilhar seus pensamentos e ideias conosco e com seus colegas editores! Vocês fizeram desta a série de encontros de editores de maior sucesso da história do Brasil, e nós esperamos que mantenham esta tradição viva.
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Figure 1. One of the feedback forms tested in the AFTv5 experiments (Option 1).

The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with editors of the English Wikipedia, is developing a tool to enable readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia. To that end, we started development of a new version of the Article Feedback Tool (known as AFTv5) in October 2011. The original version of the tool, which allows readers to rate articles based on a star system, launched in 2010. The new version invites readers to write comments that might help editors improve Wikipedia articles. We hope that this tool will contribute to the Wikimedia movement’s strategic goals of increasing participation and improving quality.

Testing new feedback forms

On December 22, 2011, we started testing three different designs for the AFTv5 feedback forms:

• Option 1: Did you find what you were looking for? (shown above)
• Option 2: Make a suggestion, give praise, report a problem or ask a question
• Option 3: Rate this article

The purpose of this first experiment was to measure the type, usefulness and volume of feedback posted with these feedback forms. For example, does asking a reader to describe what they were looking for (option 1) provide more actionable feedback than asking them to make a suggestion (option 2)?

We enabled AFTv5 on a small, randomly selected set (0.6%) of articles on the English Wikipedia, as well as a second set of high-traffic or semi-protected articles. A feedback form, randomly selected from the above three options, was placed at the bottom of each page. The feedback form was also accessible via a link docked on the bottom right corner of the page.  The resulting comments were then analyzed along a number of dimensions.

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Wikimedia Foundation operations engineer Ryan Lane. Photo by Victor Grigas, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Most top websites have thousands of software developers on staff, creating new features and keeping the site running securely. The Wikimedia Foundation has about forty. That’s pretty amazing, considering Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world. So, what’s our secret?

Well, we don’t have any secrets.

We make everything free, in every sense of the word. The technology we operate has been built by thousands of people around the world who collaborate freely and build upon each other’s contributions. Every article, every picture, every piece of code is free for anyone to use, reuse, copy, distribute and improve.

“Other tech companies wouldn’t share their installation, configuration or system documentation,” said Ryan Lane, an operations engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. These proprietary data are the competitive advantage most websites have over their peers and they guard them dearly. “Wikipedia documents and shares all of that.”

“No other organization of our scope would dream of being this open,” he added. “It is our fundamental organizing principle.”

Lane understands what it means to operate in secret. Before coming to the Foundation, he spent six years working on classified projects for the U.S. government at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO). He was forbidden from speaking about his work.

“In the government, I wouldn’t be allowed to talk about any of it. Not being able to talk about anything I do is really painful,” he said of working in a closed environment. “The ability to share everything is very freeing.”

Lane hails from New Orleans, where he studied computer science at the University of New Orleans. He has been with the Foundation for nearly two years, managing web infrastructure to ensure that Wikimedia projects become more reliable and efficient. For Lane, working in an open-source and transparent environment is what makes his work meaningful.

“In computer science, it’s very difficult not to be able to share your knowledge with other people. The way I learned most of the things I know is because people shared their expertise with me,” he noted.

Because the Wikimedia sites are so open, according to Lane, it’s much easier to collaborate with the community. In addition to the roughly 40 software developers on staff at the Foundation, there are more than 200 regular volunteer developers improving MediaWiki software, the backbone of Wikipedia and thousands of other wikis.

Lane manages Wikimedia Labs, a project that was created to allow volunteers to make contributions to MediaWiki development, tools and analytics. Working in an open environment means Lane can not only talk about a problem, he can give a total stranger a replica of our configuration system so they can help change and improve our operations infrastructure.

At a recent hackathon in San Francisco, Lane said, a programmer who had never previously worked within Wikimedia’s environment fixed a bug in the logging infrastructure behind our https site. His code was good and Lane pushed it to production. “It was running live within a few hours,” he said.

According to Lane, in a closed environment everyone has to do everything themselves, which requires more people on the whole for the organization. Or you have to pay “a lot of money to get support to come and help you, and the support is generally subpar in comparison.”

When asked whether being so transparent was a security liability, Lane argued the value of open-source was more significant than the risk of someone hacking the projects.

“It might be a little crazy to share our server configuration,” Lane admitted. “To a point, it does make us more vulnerable, but I think there’s enough benefit in it to outweigh the worries about the vulnerabilities.”

(For more information about Lane’s work with the Wikimedia projects, read his blog here.)

Reporting and story by Elaine Mao and Jordan Hu
Communications Department Interns

Having just returned from a weeklong trip to Cairo, I am happy to report that the Cairo education pilot project is off to an exciting start! As one of the newest wings of the Wikipedia Education Program, the Cairo Pilot aims to increase the quality and quantity of the Arabic Wikipedia by working with university professors who incorporate Wikipedia-editing into their classes. As described in my earlier blog post, to keep this pilot small we are involving only the top 5-15 students from a small number of classes this term (see the detailed Cairo Pilot program plan).

Cairo University students practice editing Wikipedia in a workshop led by Campus Ambassadors, March 2012.

The academic term began last month, and already the participating classes are showing great enthusiasm and promise. After participating in a faculty workshop in January — where the Cairo professors learned more about how Wikipedia works and tips around designing Wikipedia assignments from local Wikipedians and a Wikipedia Education Program faculty veteran (Rochelle Davis of Georgetown University) — the participating faculty members have incorporated innovative Wikipedia projects into their respective classes. For example, in Professor Hany Hosseiny’s mathematics class at Cairo University, students will do extensive research and write Arabic articles about famous mathematicians and mathematical concepts. Most of the students in the Cairo Pilot will do the majority of on-wiki editing in April and May, although Professor El-Toukhy’s postgraduate French students at Ain Shams University have already begun translating entire Wikipedia articles from French to Arabic (they plan to finish translating the entire 12-page-long article Civil Disobedience within the next ten days, after which they’ll move on to translating at least three other long articles). It is also worth mentioning that the vast majority of students in the pilot are women.

The Wikipedia Ambassadors in Cairo have been doing a great job explaining Wikipedia policies and editing skills to students, and the participating professors and students are very excited to play such a big role in growing Arabic free knowledge.

-Annie Lin (آني/سمر)
Wikipedia Education Program Manager

Download the complete Volume 1 (PDF)

The success of Wikipedia continues to attract an enormous amount of attention from researchers who are trying to understand what made this one of the most remarkable collaboration projects in history, and unearth valuable insights that may help to improve it. The monthly Wikimedia Research Newsletter launched in mid-2011 – shortly after the announcement of the Wikimedia Research Index – with the aim of covering recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Published jointly by the Wikimedia Research Committee and the Signpost (the English Wikipedia’s community-edited newspaper), it has established itself as a comprehensive outlet enabling both researchers and Wikipedians to stay on top of current research, aiming to facilitate exchange between these two communities.

The inaugural Signpost edition

The six issues published in the first volume (July-December 2011) featured 87 unique references (93 citations) and attracted altogether more than 17,000 pageviews in 2011, not counting the WMF blog edition. The complete Volume 1 is now available as a downloadable 45-page PDF, and a print version can be ordered from Pediapress. The full list of publications reviewed or covered in the Newsletter in 2011 can be browsed online or downloaded (as a BibTeX, RIS, PDF file or in other formats), ready to be imported into reference managers or other bodies of wiki research literature. Open access papers in this collection have been marked with a special open_access tag in the reference list and with an OA icon in the body of each issue.

We are also happy to announce the launch of @WikiResearch: a news feed on Twitter and Identi.ca, covering new preprints, papers or research-related blog posts, before they are reviewed more fully in the Newsletter.

Follow @WikiResearch for fresh Wikimedia research news

What’s more, the Newsletter is now also available in the form of an HTML email newsletter (in addition to the announcements of each new issue on the Wikiresearch-l mailing list, which only contain the table of contents). Sign up here to receive a copy of each new issue in your inbox as soon as it comes out.

The Newsletter is a collaborative effort and would not exist without those who have contributed reviews and summaries so far: Boghog, DarTar, Drdee, Hfordsa, Jodi.a.schneider, Junkie.dolphin, Lilaroja, Mietchen, Phoebe, Piotrus, Romanesco, Steven Walling, Tbayer. We are also grateful for the help of several Signpost collaborators in copyediting and preparing the final publication every month.

Finally, thanks to everyone for reading the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, and please
consider contributing by pointing us to new research we should cover, or by volunteering to review new publications.

The editors of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter:

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy
Tilman Bayer, Movement Communications

Google Summer of Code 2012

For the seventh year in a row, Wikimedia Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code program. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program where Google pays summer students USD 5000 each to code for open source projects for three months (read more).

We hope 2012′s students will develop useful chunks of MediaWiki, help us get their code shipped, and fall in love with our community such that they stay with us for years to come.

This year’s project ideas include improvements to CentralNotice, taxobox editing, search, translation tools, and more.  Interested?

University, community college, and graduate students around the world are eligible to apply to Google Summer of Code. You don’t need to be a computer science or IT major, and you can work from home.

MediaWiki is the Wikimedia Foundation's key open source project, powering Wikipedia and our other sites.

We are looking for students who already know some PHP. We also strongly prefer for you to have some experience working with Linux, Apache, and MySQL environments, and with the Git version control system. If you haven’t contributed to MediaWiki before, How to become a MediaWiki hacker is a good place to start; we will strongly prefer candidates who submit patches before the April 6th GSoC application deadline.

If you’d like to participate, check out the timeline. Make sure you are available full-time from 21 May till 20 August 2012, and have a little free time from 23 April till 20 May for ramp-up. Please read our wiki page and start talking with us on IRC in #mediawiki on Freenode about a possible project.  Then you’ll write a proposal and submit it via the official GSoC website. The deadline for you to submit a project proposal is April 6th, but we encourage you to start early and talk with us about your idea first.

We’re also seeking experienced MediaWiki developers anywhere in the world to help select and mentor student projects. We’ll take you even if you live in the southern hemisphere and it’s not summer for you. :-) You’ll need to be available online consistently so you can respond to student questions between now and late August. As Brion Vibber put it, if you “are knowledgeable about MediaWiki — not necessarily knowing every piece of it, but knowing where to look so you can help the students help themselves” then please consider helping out.

I’m administering our participation in GSoC. So I am encouraging students to apply, getting project ideas, and managing the application process overall. I look forward to seeing students discover the joy of collaborative work that improves the Wikimedia experience for millions of users. Help us spread the word.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
MediaWiki Coordinator, GSoC 2012

Of the many areas of focus for the engineering department at the Wikimedia Foundation, we constantly strive to improve the performance of Wikipedia and all of our projects.

In some cases, this means architecture changes, such as preparatory work to implement LUA as a template scripting language or the continual behind the scenes work of the Operations team to improve our network, server, database, and content delivery infrastructure.

But to make targeted improvements and to identify both success and regression, we need data. Lots of data.

Profiling MediaWiki

5 slowest EditPage methods by max 90 percent time (ms)

Since late 2005, MediaWiki has included support for profiling itself and sending out UDP packets of that data with a corresponding collector written in C by long-time volunteer Domas Mituzas.  A simple web front-end provides sortable aggregates of that data, great for identifying which functions are called the most, and their average wall clock time.

What we lacked was a system for tracking this over time, or for getting a finer-grained view than just averages, which tend to mask performance issues that only surface on certain pages, or are periodic.

We’ve also needed a way to identify performance issues within specific portions of our application, and to assess the impact of new code releases. With inspiration from Etsy’s statsd, we added bucket sampling to our original collector (allowing calculation of Nth percentages) and we wrote a python daemon that feeds call rate and timing data (average, 50th, 90th, and 99th percentiles) into graphite, a real-time graphing system with a custom data format for time-series data.

We generate profiling data on about 2 percent of requests hitting MediaWiki, and also send UDP packets to the collector every time the wfIncrStats() function is called within MediaWiki (allowing developers to easily graph or track anything with a single line of code.)

Pretty Graphs

Wikipedia pageviews/min with Forecast

We are currently tracking over 30,000 metrics in graphite, including near real-time request data from our front-end caching layer (excuse the once daily drop-off that will be fixed with pending improvements to our logging infrastructure).

We’re talking about a lot of data, from which we’ve assembled a smaller set of public dashboards accessible at gdash.wikimedia.org.

We know we have major work ahead of us to improve performance pain points experienced by our community of editors, and data will guide the way.

Asher Feldman
Performance Engineer

Students are widely using Wikipedia as a source for their school projects and as a learning tool. However, what happens if we change this procedure of just “using Wikipedia” and also engage students in writing Wikipedia? This is the main idea behind the worldwide spreading of Ambassador programs on Wikipedia projects all over the world. One promising method for an Ambassador program was tested by students who participated in cooperation with Czech WikiProject Protected areas.

The Czech WikiProject Protected areas represented by Chmee2 ran in winter semester 2011/2012 in cooperation with Jiří Reif, university teacher at Institute for Environmental Studies, Faculty of Science at the Charles University in Prague. For the project, 30 bachelor’s students participated in writing articles on the Czech Wikipedia. Students had to visit one protected area of their choice, take several pictures of the area, write an article for the Czech Wikipedia and give a public presentation for other students in the class. The presented task was comprehensive, varied and focused on individual work of participating students. We did not just want to attempt to enrich Wikipedia projects with new articles and images, but we also wanted to prepare students for future scientific work and give them the opportunity to try creative writing and critical work with references. This knowledge will soon come in handy when they start writing their bachelor’s work and prepare the defense of their bachelor’s academic degree.

Natural monument Břestecká skála, one of chosen protected areas. Students documented damage by growing tourism at this location.

The project enjoyed high popularity among students, according to the results of a survey. A full report with results from this cooperation is available on Czech Wikipedia in English. Here we present only a short summary of this cooperation and main lessons that we learned.

Unlike other ambassador projects where ambassador is supporting students mainly virtually in the Wikipedia environment, our ambassador was personally present at each class. This gave us the opportunity to directly interact with students, easily giving feedback about articles and answering their questions about Wikipedia. And of course, the ambassador was active also on Czech Wikipedia, correcting student’s edits. We realized that this in-person approach is more time-consuming for an ambassador than virtual assistance is. But it is better for the community on Wikipedia and for students. The ambassadors are able to help students understand all standards and rules of Czech Wikipedia without relying on the greater Wikipedia community. As a result, Wikipedia was enriched with high-quality articles containing references with only minor effort from the community. And students were able to directly and easily ask questions and get their answers.

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