#Wikipedia - the death of Eric Garner

Mr Garner died in New York. For whatever reason he was held in a choke hold by a police officer. Because of the stress or whatever, Mr Garner died of a cardiac arrest. Sadly there are many such incidents in the United States. It is not that strange given how much violence in all kind of forms is celebrated. It is not strange when many police officers think they are invulnerable to any critique.

It is a sad story, it is a news worthy story but it is not a story worthy of an encyclopedia. At best it is worthy of a footnote in an article on police behaviour in 2014. Given that there is a Wikipedia article, there is a Wikidata item. Given that Wikidata has the aspiration to include Wikinews, it may not be that bad but still.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia Foundation has a new #MD

I just heard that Lila Tretikov will be the new MD for the Wikimedia Foundation. Many people will say "wise" words. I do better, I may be first and I just show a picture of her reaching out..
Thanks,
      GerardM

correction.. executive director .. she will manage :)

Good news learned at the new #Wikinews

The Farsi Wikinews has been created. I visited the new wiki and a happy surprise awaited me; noticeable improvements in right to left support..

The user preferences are now beautifully alligned. The page looks as it should. It is likely to have been fixed as part of the usability initiative and attention to details like this show how valuable it has been.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Korean #Wikinews has been created :)

A joyous occasion; the Korean Wikinews has been created. RobH has been so gracious to create it, the first data has been transferred to the project itself. It is now to its community to make it a success!
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Usability testing without language restrictions

When the #Wikimedia Foundation accepted the grant that paid for the usability initiative, it came with restrictions. The money was to make the English Wikipedia more usable. It does and it did make significant improvements, the "vector" skin is a vast improvement; I use it where I can. The en.wikinews made it its default skin and I expect that many projects will follow.

While the new developments were not targeted to other projects and languages, they did benefit. Test projects were started for other languages and people were invited to test and to comment. As I understand it, the "vector" skin is better at supporting right to left languages like Arabic.

The multimedia usability project being next, does not have any language restrictions and arguably, if the quality and quantity of Commons is to improve, it is the "other" languages and cultures that are not covered as well as the Western languages like English, German, French and Dutch.

To improve Commons, I would concentrate on one western language; English. One language with a right to left script and one language with a Cyrillic script. The choice for Arabic and Russian would be obvious. Given the expertise at the WMF, I might add Japanese to make it a really nice mix.

Each of these languages pose their issues. Each of these languages represent big vibrant projects that show a healthy growth in traffic. When money is to be spend on usability tests, research in these languages and cultures will have more impact then testing additional western languages. Personally I would consider looking for a partner in a country like Indonesia, they are more likely to have expertise in Asian languages then companies in San Francisco.

In her letter to the board on strategy, Sue argues that our community is to diversify. It seems to me that the multimedia usability project has the potential to have a big impact in reaching out to those places where we want to do better.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Ζαχαρίας Διακονικολάου blogs as my guest today :)

When I first got the mail about the translatewiki.net rally I decided to participate. I had missed the previous rally (December 2008) for only a few messages and so I wanted to contribute from the beginning in order not to miss it like before.

I started contributing from the first day of the rally and I finished the 500 new translations in the second day. I was translating in the MediaWiki extensions. Then me and Omnipaedista decided to finish the MediaWiki core which had only a few messages left untranslated and after that the Extensions used by Wikimedia. The work there was hard (big and difficult messages) but we finally achieved it.

In the whole effort I was looking in the translator score because I wanted very much to be the first one in the top of the month and the week. Also, another thing I wanted was to improve a lot the statistics of the Greek language. Besides that I also worked with the Pontic localisation in order to work on FreeCol.

By making all these many things were achieved. The Greek Wikinews completed the localisation requirement. My knowledge in Pontic was improved a lot and learned a variety of useful things in it. The Greek language had a brilliant progress in localization. But the main thing is that I became more familiar with translate wiki, I understood much better the system, and that I experienced something very useful for me.

Of course, everything we achieved during the rally should be maintained. That is why there are 3 Greek translators (me included) that will be looking on the interface to update it and translate the new messages.

In the future, the biggest goal is to complete the greek language localization. Some other goals which I would like to achieve is to get in the top 50 translators and reach the 25% of FreeCol in Pontic language. So generally I am not planning to disappear from translatewiki.

Finally, I would like to thank Gerard for the honor of being the first guest in his blog and all the translatewiki Staff that made this rally take place. I hope that there will others too in the future.

Thanks,
     ZaDiak

Congratulations are due

Today I want to congratulate:

• Ting
• Mindspillage
• Sj

They were elected for the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation !!

Today I want to congratulate the communities of the

• Sorani Wikipedia
• Western Panjabi Wikipedia
• Mirandese Wikipedia
• Acehnese Wikipedia
• Turkish Wikinews

A big thank you is due to Rob Halsell who did the creation in record time !!

A big thank you to all the people who bothered to vote !! You elected a cool group of board members.

PS Thank you to everyone who put their trust in me :)
Thanks,
GerardM

New projects are ready for new business

I am really happy and grateful that the projects that have been approved have been created. These new projects with the exception of the Wikinews projects are now available under a combined CC-by-sa and GFDL license. As Erik indicated in the past, this will prove necessary at the time when the latest version of the GFDL will finally be published.

I wish the new projects well in their quest to provide the type of information that they are creating for to the people they are there for.

A special word of thanks to Tim Starling for making a difference :)
Thanks,
GerardM