User talk:Dick Bos/Archive2016
archive 2016 please don't edit!
The Signpost: 06 January 2016 edit
- News and notes: The WMF's age of discontent
- In the media: Impenetrable science; Jimmy Wales back in the UAE
- Arbitration report: Catflap08 and Hijiri88 case been decided
- Featured content: Featured menagerie
- Recent research: Teaching Wikipedia, Does advertising the gender gap help or hurt Wikipedia?
- WikiProject report: Try-ing to become informed - WikiProject Rugby League
- Technology report: Tech news in brief
The Signpost: 13 January 2016 edit
- News and notes: Community objections to new Board trustee
- In focus: The Crisis at New Montgomery Street
- Editorial: We need a culture of verification
- Op-ed: Transparency (by James Heilman)
- Blog: Inside the game of sports vandalism on Wikipedia
- Community view: Strategy and controversy
- In the media: War and peace; WMF board changes; Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedias
- Traffic report: Pattern recognition: Third annual Traffic Report
- Special report: Wikipedia community celebrates Public Domain Day 2016
- Featured content: This Week's Featured Content
- Arbitration report: Interview: outgoing and incumbent arbitrators 2016
- Technology report: Tech news in brief
The Signpost: 20 January 2016 edit
- News and notes: Vote of no confidence; WMF trustee speaks out
- Op-ed: Not a pretty picture: Thoughts on the "monkey selfie" debacle
- In the media: 15th anniversary news round-up
- Traffic report: Danse Macabre
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Blog: Fifteen years ago, Wikipedia was a very different place: Magnus Manske
The Signpost: 03 February 2016 edit
- From the editors: Help wanted
- In focus: The Knight Foundation grant: a timeline and an email to the board
- Op-ed: So, what’s a knowledge engine anyway?
- Special report: Board chair and new trustee speak with the Signpost
- Traffic report: Bowled
- News and notes: Harassment survey 2015; Luis Villa to leave WMF; knowledge engine background
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Arbitration report: Catching up on arbitration
The Signpost: 10 February 2016 edit
- Special report: New leaked internal documents raise questions about the origins of the Knowledge Engine
- News and notes: Another WMF departure
- In the media: Jeb Bush takes a swing at Wikipedia, and connects
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Traffic report: A river of revilement
The Signpost: 17 February 2016 edit
- Blog: Antonin Scalia and the editor tracking his legacy
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Op-ed: Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month
- Special report: Search and destroy: the Knowledge Engine and the undoing of Lila Tretikov
- Technology report: Tech news in brief
- Traffic report: Super Bowling
The Signpost: 24 February 2016 edit
- Special report: WMF in limbo as decision on Tretikov nears
- Op-ed: Backward the Foundation
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Traffic report: Of Dead Pools and Dead Judges
- Arbitration report: Motion on CheckUser and Oversight inactivity
- Technology report: Tech news in brief
VisualEditor News #1—2016 edit
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.
Recent changes edit
You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.
Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.
The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.
Future changes edit
The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:
- Remember my last editor,
- Always give me the visual editor if possible,
- Always give me the source editor, and
- Show me both editor tabs. (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)
The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. This will affect the following languages, amongst others: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic.
Let's work together edit
- Please try out the newest version of the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You may need to restore the default preferences (at the bottom of test2wiki:Special:Preferences) to see the initial prompt for options. Were you able to find a preference setting that will work for your own editing? Did you see the large preferences dialog box when you started editing an article there?
- Can you read and type in Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Indic, or Han scripts? Does typing in these languages feels natural in the visual editor? Language engineer David Chan needs to know. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org.
- Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Join the Tech Talk about "Automated citations in Wikipedia: Citoid and the technology behind it" with Sebastian Karcher on 29 February 2016.
If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
This Month in Education: [March 2016] edit
By Walaa Abdel Manaem (Wikipedia Education Program Egypt) & (Egypt Wikimedians user group)
Snippet: Education Leaders at WISE Doha 2015 introducing Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt to WISE Conference attendees, as an example of a program in the Arab World, to share their experience to inspire other universities and institutions starting new programs in the area.
WISE 2015 Sessions and Plenaries were designed around three main pillars such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals; education and the economy; fostering innovation in education systems. Each pillar examined a variety of key topics including: the linkages between education, employment, and entrepreneurship; education reform and innovation in the MENA region and Qatar; emerging models of education financing, attracting, rewarding and retaining quality teachers; and the importance of investing in early childhood development.
Representatives of Wikipedia Education Program Walaa Abdel Manaem and Reem Al-Kashif participated in WISE Doha 2015 in Qatar, the annual World Innovation Summit for Education is the premier international platform dedicated to innovation and creative action in education where top decision-makers share insights with on-the-ground practitioners and collaborate to rethink education. Also, WISE 2015 was the first global education conference following the ratification of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015. Contributions ranged from Arabic Brochure of Editing Wikipedia for students in WEP in Egypt and everybody who would like to edit Wikipedia without problems, The Arabic version of Welcome to Wikipedia reference guideline, PDF of brochure handed out during Arabic Wikipedia Convening, Doha, Qatar, 2011 and Introduction to Wikipedia. These contributions are related to show a case study of Wikipedia Education program in Egypt and how it worked since February 2012 till the November 2015, as the seventh edition ended last October. All discussions were about the program's mechanism and what were the motivations keeping it going. The program helped increasing gender diversity and supported the featured content on Arabic Wikipedia. Wikipedia Education Program, like any other initiative, has achievements and dark sides, for that reason, the representatives had to locate both of them and how they influence the Arabic community and how the community interact with this phenomenon.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt here.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education program in the Arab World here (in Arabic).
Snippet: A first-of-its-kind, for-credit, elective course that focuses on contributing to Wikipedia has opened at Tel Aviv University and is now available to all B.A. students on campus
On October 19th a new for-credit elective course called "Wikipedia: Skills for producing and consuming knowledge"[1] has opened at Tel Aviv University (TAU). The semester-long course (13 weeks) is available to all B.A. students on campus and this semester about 50 students from various disciplines are taking part in this first-of-its-kind course in Israel.
The course draws from "flipped classroom" concepts and uses "blended learning" methods, which practically means combining in-class lectures, workshops and small-group activities, as well as online individual learning. Both the Moodle learning management system (LMS) and the Wikipedia Education Extension are used to monitor the students' work and progress throughout the course.
The course has 2 main assignments - expanding an existing stub, as well as writing a new article, in the hopes that the content added during the course will assist not only the students themselves, but also future generations of learners as well as the general public. Though the course focuses on adding quality content to Wikipedia, it also aims to help students sharpen their academic skills and their 21st century skills, highlighting collaborative learning, joint online research and interdisciplinary collaborations in the process of constructing knowledge.
This course was initiated and is led by Shani Evenstein, an educator, Wikimedian and member of the Wikipedia Education Collaborative, in collaboration with the Orange Institute for Internet Studies, as well as the School of Education at TAU. The syllabus for the new course builds on the success of Wiki-Med, a for-credit elective course, which was designed in 2013 and is led by Evenstein at the Sackler school of Medicine for the third consecutive year. While Wiki-med is focused on contributing medical content to Wikipedia and is only available to Medical Students on campus, the new course is designed to accommodate students from different academic disciplines and varying backgrounds.
The course was chosen to be part of TAU's cross-discipline elective courses system ("Kelim Shluvim") and was approved by the Vice-Rector, who heads the program. In that, the course marks an important precedent in the collaboration between Academia and the Wikipedia Education Program, as it is the first time a higher institution acknowledges the importance of a course focusing on Wikipedia on a university level, offering it to all students, rather than a faculty level or individual lecturers as mostly practiced. It is our hope that other higher education institutions will follow this example and offer similar courses to students both in Israel and around the world.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Israel here.
By Melina Masnatta, Wikimedia Argentina
Snippet: University professors become Wikipedians in an online course during just a week.
Educators with different profiles and from different latin america countries, but most of them professors at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) from different faculties, have just participated in the online training and free course "Educational scenarios with technology. Among the real and the possible" organized by the Center for Innovation in Technology and Pedagogy (CITEP) of this university.
Different educational activities were carried out simultaneously. During the week and under the topic “Open movement”, Wikimedia Argentina participated with three different proposals: starting with an interview of Patricio Lorente accompanied with a short text to know more about the movement. To make an immersive experience we designed " Knowing Wikipedia by first-hand or Wikipedia in the first person" to work directly on the platform translating articles from english to spanish from a list created especially for that purpose. Along with this specific proposal, educators participated in a videoconference with Galileo Vidoni (available in Spanish), where participants could talk and learn more about how are the first steps to become a Wikipedian and the importance of the movement at the local and regional level.
With only seven days and without being mandatory, different educators discovered how to edit on Wikipedia, indeed many of them mentioned that they had it as a pending to learn and participate on the free encyclopedia, but never had the time or the real chance. The enthusiasm was also present on social networks, where they shared the experience with the hashtag #escenariostec.
The result
More than 100 educators got involved and exchanged their experience in an online forum with more of 280 messages that reflected their learning process while experiencing with the activity. 80 of them were new users, and they created 61 new articles in spanish. An important fact: 78 of them were women, which means that working with educators is a key issue to continue closing the digital gender gap.
Finally from CITEP, they shared the following insights regarding the question that ran through all the activities that took place during the week dedicated to the open movement. Some thoughts can be sum up as follows:We share some of the voices of the protagonists in social networks with storify (available in Spanish). Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina here.The collaborative production in open environments: chaos or construction? (...) For the teacher also means accepting new challenges: encourage students to produce knowledge in an environment of divergent nature, it requires permanent operations and convergence. In a space that fosters interventions unmarked, the teacher needs to frame depending on the purpose of education and teaching purposes. (…) Wikipedia is the best example of the challenges posed by the digital era in the educational field, it forces us to rethink the relationship between technology and the production of knowledge and allows us to confirm that the collaborative work does not lead to chaos, if not to the construction. (. ..) [Authors: Angeles Solectic and Miri Latorre]
By Vojtěch Dostál (Wikimedia Czech Republic)
Snippet: The second largest university in the Czech Republic has employed a Wikipedian in residence, leading to a boom of Wikimedia activities in the city of Brno.
Collaboration between Wikipedia and Czech institutions has always been a priority for Wikimedia Czech Republic, but the year 2015 has taken this to another level. First, an official memorandum of collaboration with the National Heritage Institute (NPÚ) was signed in May 2015, to be followed by official collaboration with Masaryk University in Brno (the second largest city and university in the Czech Republic), which was contracted in November 2015. In fact, Wikimedia activities in Brno have been blooming for several years now, mainly as a result of the community's own development, but aided substantially by the external interest in Wikipedia by Masaryk University alumni society, demonstrated as early as March 2013.
In February 2015, the university employed one of the most experienced Czech Wikipedians – Marek Blahuš (Blahma) – who was appointed to become the university's first "Wikipedian in residence". Marek Blahuš has been in the center of the Wikimedia community in Brno for about two years, organizing regular Wikipedia meetups, the 2014 edition of the annual WikiConference (more in English here) and creating the Czech-Slovak Wikipedia translation tool, which has famously led to the creation of >9000 articles on Czech and Slovak Wikipedias (more in English here). His current work as Wikipedian in residence is funded by Masaryk University and runs under the patronage of Wikimedia Czech Republic as well as Masaryk University's rector Mikuláš Bek.
Since February, Wikipedia has taken a prominent role within Masaryk University. Marek Blahuš started a "Masaryk University Wikipedians team", gathering local Wikipedians and facilitating contacts with the university, aided by his status of a graduate and current employee in its language center. Articles about Masaryk University alumni and faculties have been identified and improved after consultations with Masaryk University archives and libraries which provided helpful resources. Wikipedia citation templates can now be directly generated from the university's on-line archive of theses. In September, a public conference called "Masaryk University Is Getting High on Wikipedia" took place on university grounds, featuring the experienced Wikipedian Jan Sokol (Sokoljan), who is a philosopher, university teacher and a former presidential candidate. The talks focused on the use of Wikipedia in university education, in line with the successful Czech "Students Write Wikipedia" program. One of the teachers, Jiří Rambousek, expressed his desire to organize a Wikipedia Club as a regular meetup where articles would be improved in a collaborative effort and new editors introduced to Wikipedia.
The program is actively preparing for 2016 when we expect Wikimedia Czech Republic to take a more active role in overseeing the initiatives as well as the creation of a position of a "Wikipedian in Brno" – person officially in charge of the wide array of Wikimedia activities happening in the city. The chapter's annual plan includes initiatives to increase the number of university courses which incorporate Wikipedia into the curriculum, public presentations of Wikipedia at various events, scanning and uploading of images from institutional and personal archives, and much more. Let's wish that our plans come true!
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in the Czech Republic here.
By Leigh Thelmadatter (Wiki Learning-Tec de Monterrey)
Snippet: Student participation is more than just text!
For the Fall 2015 Wiki Learning-Tec de Monterrey held two wiki expeditions in Mexico City and began a collaboration with the Museo de Arte Popular. We also received our first grant!
Wiki expeditions edit
The 32-campus Tec de Monterrey system has each semester an event called "Semana i" (i Week), when students forego normal classes for an entire week to work on challenging projects called "retos." For the Mexico City and Santa Fe campuses, one option for students was to work with Wikimedia, with the aptly named projects "Reto Wikimedia." Both campuses opted to do wiki-expeditions to different parts of Mexico City. The Mexico City campus had the larger group with almost 90 students registered, who covered the two southern boroughs of Xochimilco and Tlalpan. The Santa Fe group had 35 participants, and covered the San Ángel neighborhood found not far from this campus.
Both campus took photos of landmarks with the Mexico City campus also focusing on photos of everyday life in the south of the city. The Mexico City campus tallied 5264 photos, 8 videos and 36 articles, including articles related to the area into French, Swedish and Danish. The Santa Fe group tallied 605 photos, and ten articles in Spanish on landmarks in San Ángel.
In addition, the Mexico City campus had a special speaker the borough chronicler of Xochmilco, Sebastián Flores Farfán. A short montage video of the event is in the works.
Some student photos:
Some video clips of the event:
Animation clips with the Museo de Arte Popular edit
Wikiservicio, students working with Wikimedia for their community service requirement, added a new component. To attract more students and encourage more students to do all of their community service hours with Wikimedia, a collaboration was set up with the Museo de Arte Popular (MAP)... the first of many we hope! Six students from the digital art and animation major (see last newsletter) have continued working with Wikimedia, but focusing their efforts in creating short animation clips in relation to the mission of promoting and preserving Mexican folk art. One clip has been completed and can be see to the right of this text. So far, the video has subtitles in English, German, French and Punjabi. A second clip is nearing completion at the time of this writing.
Classes and Wikimetrics edit
Fifteen students completed work with Wikiservicio doing translations, writing new articles and doing photography projects. As of this date, 7 have indicated interest in working with Wikiservicio on campus and another six with MAP.
Five university level classes and one high school class on the Mexico City (South) campus have had projects, all in writing and translation, with some video work.
Wikimetrics for the semester are:
According to Wikimetrics tool....
- 9,589,918 bytes to Spanish Wikipedia
- 3,098 edits to the mainspace of Spanish Wikipedia
- 367 pages created in the mainspace of Spanish Wikipedia
Manual count
- 302 student and teacher participants
- 281 Spanish Wikipedia articles created or expanded
- 6,057 photographs
- 10 videos
- 9 articles in English Wikipedia
- 2 articles in French Wikipedia
- 1 article in Swedish Wikipedia
- 1 article in Danish Wikipedia
First grant Wiki Learning received its first grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. The long-term goal of this grant is to establish a system for financing Wiki Learning. The grant, which totals a modest 12,500 Mexican pesos, will be used for swag, such as t shirts, stickers, buttons, etc, especially for Semana i activities and promotion of wiki activities to other campus. The money will also be used for incidental travel expenses, especially for projects needing to move expensive camera equipment.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Mexico here.
By Christian Cariño (Wikimedia México) and Melina Masnatta (Wikimedia Argentina)
Snippet: Aprender para Educar writes about Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina.
The digital free magazine Aprender para Educar (Learning to educate) of the National Technological University (UTN) is recognized in the community of education and technology in Argentina to write about innovation issues in Spanish, which is not common in the academic dissemination and teacher training field.
Cristina Velazquez, general editor of the magazine invited Wikimedia Argentina to write an article that generally describes their activities in the Education Program, after reading the proposal she decided to publish it as the main article of the 12th edition.
To describe the education program, WMAR wrote two notes completing one another, as doing a zoom: from the local to the global and from the global to the local, showing how a movement of this magnitude does not stand alone, it is part of a huge network.
Melina Masnatta, education manager in WMAR and Patricio Lorente, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees wrote those two notes.The first one focuses on the Education Program, implementation, challenges and obstacles that they had at the beginning, plans to integrate it into the classrooms in Argentina and how different Wikimedia Projects are also relevant in education. The most important thing, Melina adds, is to strengthen the values that inspire them, show how the free culture give meaning to education in general and digital culture in particular.
Meanwhile in the second part, Lorente focuses on the global movement, the community pillars, the agenda of today's challenges and the effort of their volunteers as protagonists. It is not easy show the world what drives us and why we work as volunteers in different countries. In education very few people understand the value of building free knowledge. There is still a great prejudice or negative perceptions of Wikipedia in the classroom because teachers ignore how Wikipedia is built.
Everybody reads Wikipedia, but few people edit it. We can change this fact by spreading in spaces such as the Journal of the UTN and inviting more people to collaborate and be the protagonist of this huge collective work for humanity.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina here.By Walaa Abdel Manaem (Wikipedia Education Program Egypt) & (Egypt Wikimedians user group)
Snippet: Online ambassador helped spanish students course in Cairo University to nominate their articles, scoring an exceptional record of WEP excellent content.
Bassem Fleifel, an online ambassador of Cairo university spanish course, played a prominent role to help all students to encourage them to nominate their excellent content to be a featured and good articles in Arabic Wikipedia. Those articles are History of bread (Featured article); Walt Disney; Daniel Radcliffe; Al-Andalus; Poet in New York; and Popol Vuh.
The seventh term, the program started in Cairo University with promoting posts on Wikipedia and social media websites to help new participants understand the general idea of the program as well as holding meetings with professors from the departments of History, chinese, English language and Spanish language. Walaa Abdel Manaem (program leader in Cairo University) and Bassem Fleifel (online ambassador) have held some workshops in campus and online for the whole students to teach them "How to edit Wikipedia". On the other hand, Prof. Abeer Abdel-Hafiz has exerted great efforts with her students in addition to introducing Walaa to new classes of senior students for whom she has organized general seminars about Wikipedia and the education program. At the same time Walaa was assigning her Spanish department students of the first and second year to edit Wikipedia.
This term, Prof. Abeer let the chance to her students to choose any articles they would like to translate from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia or working on articles about history. They already have chosen some articles to translate with the target of nominating them to be a featured and good articles.
Most of students worked on articles about different topics like history, writers, actors, history of food and drink, mayan literature, islam and politics, etc. This course itself achieved an exceptional record of Wikipedia Education program excellent content and the best term ever in the history of WEP in Egypt in general and in the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University in specific. Walaa has held 2 online webinars to follow up with her students in addition to the workshops held at the campus. Regarding numbers, 38 students joined this course, of which 35 are female and 3 are male students. They worked on 1748 articles adding more than 12,282,943 million bytes to the article namespace on the Arabic Wikipedia, with the help of the online ambassador, who also participated as a student.
See the course page of this group on the Arabic Wikipedia here.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt here.
By Jorid Martinsen (Wikimedia Norge)
Snippet: This fall masters students in History and Archeology at the University of Oslo take on the task of Wikipedia editing as one of the main parts in a subject on communication of History.
The University of Oslo is Norway’s largest higher education institution, and it is the first time Wikimedia Norway collaborates with this University in forming and using Wikipedia editing as a integrated part of higher education. The collaboration started by Wikimedia Norway contacting assistant professor John McNicol, who already had gotten some media attention on his eagerness to make students skilled in knowledge sharing.
Starting off with a two hour lecture on the secret world of Wikipedia and a two hour editing workshop in mid-September, and in October the students will evaluate the life of their articles. Has there been many additional edits on their articles? Discussions? Request to delete everything? For Wikimedia Norge it is fun to see the students both engaging in Wikipedia editing and using the ways of Wikipedia to discuss how knowledge is formed.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Norway here.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:26, 1 March 2016 (UTC).This Month in Education: [March 2016] edit
- Argentina: Educational hackathon about digital sources, big data, and Wikipedia
- Argentina and Mexico: First mentoring program between the Argentine and Mexican chapters
- Czech Republic: Czech education program turns professional with a new education manager
- Egypt: Egyptian Wikimedians celebrate the seventh conference of WEP
- Nigeria: Wikipedia workshop for students of Fountain University
- Sverige: Teacher celebrated for excellent pedagogy with Wikipedia
- Taiwan: Taiwanese students use Spoken Wikipedia as their service learning
- Global: Education Program Historic Data Campaign
- Global: Articles of interest in other publications
We apologize for an earlier distribution that mistakenly took on the older content. We hope you enjoy the newest issue of the newsletter we are sharing now.--Sailesh Patnaik (Distribution leader) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:44, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 2 March 2016 edit
- News and notes: Tretikov resigns, WMF in transition
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Traffic report: Brawling
The Signpost: 09 March 2016 edit
- Blog: The new alchemy: turning online harassment into Wikipedia articles on women scientists
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- In the media: Wikipedian is break-out star of International Women's Day; dinosaur art; Wikipedia's new iOS app and its fight for market share
- News and notes: Katherine Maher named interim head of WMF; Wales email re-sparks Heilman controversy; draft WMF strategy posted
- Op-ed: A modest proposal for Wikimedia’s future
- Systemic bias: Revenge of "I can’t believe we didn’t have an article on ..."
- Technology report: Wikimedia wikis will temporarily go into read-only mode on several occasions in the coming weeks
- Traffic report: All business like show business
- WikiCup report: First round of the WikiCup finishes
The Signpost: 16 March 2016 edit
- News and notes: Wikipedia Zero: Orange mobile partnership in Africa ends; the evolution of privacy loss in Wikipedia
- In the media: Wales at SXSW; lawsuit over Wikipedia PR editing
- Discussion report: Is an interim WMF executive director inherently notable?
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Traffic report: Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States
- Technology report: Watchlists, watchlists, watchlists!
- Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #119: The Foundation and the departure of Lila Tretikov
The Signpost: 23 March 2016 edit
- News_and_notes: Lila Tretikov a Young Global Leader; Wikipediocracy blog post sparks indefinite blocks
- In_the_media: Angolan file sharers cause trouble for Wikipedia Zero; the 3D printer edit war; a culture based on change and turmoil
- Editorial: "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
- Traffic report: Be weary on the Ides of March
- Featured content: Watch out! A slave trader, a live mascot and a crested serpent awaits!
- Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel article 3 case amended
- Wikipedia_Weekly: Podcast #120: Status of Wikimania 2016
The Signpost: 1 April 2016 edit
- News and notes: Trump/Wales 2016
- WikiProject report: Why should the Devil have all the good music? An interview with WikiProject Christian music
- Traffic report: Donald v Daredevil
- Featured content: A slow, slow week
- Technology report: Browse Wikipedia in safety? Use Telnet!
- Recent research: "Employing Wikipedia for good not evil" in education, useing eyetracking to find out how readers read articles
- Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #121: How April fools went down
The Signpost: 14 April 2016 edit
- News and notes: Denny Vrandečić resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board
- In the media: Wikimedia Sweden loses copyright case; Tex Watson; AI assistants; David Jolly biography
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Traffic report: A welcome return to pop culture and death
- Arbitration report: The first case of 2016—Wikicology
- Gallery: A history lesson
The Signpost: 24 April 2016 edit
- Special report: Update on EranBot, our new copyright violation detection bot
- Featured content: The double-sized edition
- Traffic report: Two for the price of one
- Arbitration report: Amendments made to the Race and intelligence case
The Signpost: 2 May 2016 edit
- In the media: Wikipedia Zero piracy in Bangladesh; bureaucracy; chilling effects; too few cooks; translation gaps
- Traffic report: Purple
- Featured content: The best... from the past two weeks
The Signpost: 17 May 2016 edit
- Op-ed: Swiss chapter in turmoil
- In the media: Wikimedia's Dario Taraborelli quoted on Google's Knowledge Graph in The Washington Post
- Featured content: Two weeks for the prize of one
- Traffic report: Oh behave, Beyhive / Underdogss
- Arbitration report: "Wikicology" ends in site ban; evidence and workshop phases concluded for "Gamaliel and others"
- Wikicup: That's it for WikiCup Round 2!
The Signpost: 28 May 2016 edit
- Special report: Compensation paid to Sue Gardner increased by almost 50 percent after she stepped down as executive director
- News and notes: Upcoming Wikimedia conferences in the US and India; May Metrics and Activities Meeting
- Op-ed: Journey of a Wikipedian
- Featured content: Eight articles, three lists and five pictures
- Traffic report: Splitting (musical) airs / Slow Ride
- Arbitration report: Gamaliel resigns from the committee
This Month in Education: [June 2016] edit
- Argentina: A New Online Course in a New Virtual Campus
- Czech Republic: How to survive the Big Bang in your education program
- Estonia: An online elective course on Wikipedia for high school pupils in Estonia
- Greece: Argostoli Evening School students and a Wikitherapy participant turn Wiktionary project into Android app
- Israel: New training materials in Arabic by WMIL
- Mexico: Luz María Silva's students and their adventure editing Spanish Wikipedia
- Mexico: Spring semester wiki activities end at Tec de Monterrey, Mexico City
- Netherlands: Maastricht University 40 years
- Sweden: Students in Sweden edit Somali Wikipedia
- Taiwan: Visualizations of relationships among knowledge? Try WikiSeeker!
- Wikimania 2016: Education at Wikimania
- Wikimedia Foundation: Education Program surveys are here!
- Wikimedia Foundation: Vahid Masrour joins the education team at the Wikimedia Foundation
- Global: Programs and Events Dashboard Update
- Global: Articles of interest in other publications
We hope you enjoy the newest issue of the Education Newsletter.--Sailesh Patnaik (Distribution leader) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:53, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 05 June 2016 edit
- News and notes: WMF cuts budget for 2016-17 as scope tightens
- Featured content: Overwhelmed ... by pictures
- Traffic report: Pop goes the culture, again.
- Arbitration report: ArbCom case "Gamaliel and others" concludes
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Video Games
The Signpost: 15 June 2016 edit
- News and notes: Clarifications on status and compensation of outgoing executive directors Sue Gardner and Lila Tretikov
- Special report: Wikiversity Journal—A new user group
- In the media: Biography disputes; Craig Newmark donation; PR editing
- Featured content: From the crème de la crème
- Traffic report: Another one with sports; Knockout, brief candle
Editing News #2—2016 edit
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Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.
Recent changes edit
The visual editor is now available to all users at most Wikivoyages. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.
The single edit tab feature combines the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Editing" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.
Future changes edit
The "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.
The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)
The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.
Let's work together edit
- Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
- Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Watch the Tech Talk by Sebastian Karcher for more information.
If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
17:18, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 21 July 2016 edit
- Discussion report: Busy month for discussions
- Featured content: A wide variety from the best
- Traffic report: Sports and esports
- Arbitration report: Script writers appointed for clerks
The Signpost: 4 August 2016 edit
- News and notes: Foundation presents results of harassment research, plans for automated identification; Wikiconference submissions open
- Obituary: Kevin Gorman, who took on Wikipedia's gender gap and undisclosed paid advocacy, dies at 24
- Traffic report: Summer of Pokémon, Trump, and Hillary
- Featured content: Woman and Hawaii
- Recent research: Easier navigation via better wikilinks
- Technology report: User script report (January to July 2016, part 1)
This Month in Education: [September 2016] edit
- Armenia: Armenian students inspire their parents to join Wikipedia
- Brazil: Brazilian Wikimedians interview editor of academic journal Wiki Studies
- Egypt: Cairo University students wrap up their eighth term and start their ninth term on WEP
- Egypt: Egyptian Wikimedians celebrate eighth WEP conference
- Greece: Online wiki training for educators in Greece
- Israel: Outcomes report on a Wikipedia Course “Skills for Producing and Consuming Knowledge”, Tel Aviv University
- Israel: Wikipedia as a Teaching and Learning Tool in Medical Education at IAMSE Medical Education Conference
- Israel: "Writing a new article is a special experience that feels new every time"
- Mexico: Video projects redefine student Wiki work and student community service
- Russia: Wiki Workshop at Saint Petersburg Internet Conference 2016 in Russia
- Sweden: Swedish National Agency of Education endorses Wikipedia Education Program
- Turkey: Psychology students of Uludag University are very proud of contributing Turkish Wikipedia
- West Africa: West African schools will test Kiwix, the offline Wikipedia reader
- Global: Programs and Events Dashboard Update
- Global: Articles of interest in other publications
We hope you enjoy the newest issue of the Education Newsletter.-- Sailesh Patnaik using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:00, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 September 2016 edit
- News and notes: Case study of Wikimedia Education Program published; remembrance of departed colleague Ray Saintonge (Eclecticology)
- In the media: This edition's roundup of media coverage
- Featured content: Three weeks in the land of featured content
- Arbitration report: Arbcom looking for new checkusers and oversight appointees while another case opens
- Traffic report: From Gene Wilder to JonBenét: Four weeks of traffic
- Technology report: Category sorting and template parameters
The Signpost: 14 October 2016 edit
- News and notes: Fundraising, flora and fauna
- Discussion report: Cultivating leadership: Wikimedia Foundation seeks input
- Technology report: Upcoming tech projects for 2017
- Traffic report: Debates and escapes
- Recent research: A 2011 study resurfaces in a media report
- Featured content: Variety is the spice of life
Editing News #3—2016 edit
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Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.
Recent changes edit
- You can now set text as small or big.[1]
- Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon.[2] A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.[3]
- Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.[4]
- At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department is adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more at mediawiki.org.[5]
- The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page.[6] In the future, the "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
- Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image. Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.[7]
Future changes edit
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.
The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.
Let's work together edit
- Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
- If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
17:48, 15 October 2016 (UTC)
Whose Knowledge? user group update edit
Hi Dick! Thanks for joining the Whose Knowledge user group - we’re so glad to have you involved!
Here are some updates about recent activities:
- User group approved: Our user group was officially approved in October - hooray! Big thanks to Raystorm and FloNight for the idea to create a user group for the Whose Knowledge? campaign :)
- Mapping feminist knowledge at AWID's 2016 Forum: Interested in learning more about what we’ve been doing lately? Read our blog post on what we learned from mapping feminist knowledge at Association for Women's Rights in Developments 2016 Forum.
- New grant proposal:
- We’ve proposed a WMF project grant. It would be great to have your feedback and/or endorsement by November 1 if this project interests you!
- It would also be great to have your help notifying communities already working on systemic bias about this proposal. Here is a draft message to use if you'd like - please translate, change as you see fit for your own context, and share in any communities you’re active in on and off-wiki!
Looking forward to doing more together very soon! Siko (talk) 01:55, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 4 November 2016 edit
- In the media: Washington Post continues in-depth Wikipedia coverage
- Wikicup: Winners announced
- Discussion report: What's on your tech wishlist for the coming year?
- Featured content: Cream of the crop
- Technology report: New guideline for technical collaboration; citation templates now flag open access content
- Arbitration report: Recapping October's activities
- Traffic report: Un-presidential politics
The Signpost: 26 November 2016 edit
- Special report: Taking stock of the Good Article backlog
- News and notes: Arbitration Committee elections commence
- Traffic report: President-elect Trump
- Featured content: Featured mix
The Signpost: 22 December 2016 edit
- Year in review: Looking back on Wikimedia's 2016
- Special report: German Wikipedia ArbCom implodes amid revelation of member's far-right political role
- Traffic report: Post-election traffic blues
- Featured content: The pre-Christmas edition
- Technology report: Labs improvements impact 2016 Tool Labs survey results
- Recent research: One study and several abstracts
This Month in Education: December 2016 edit
- Greece: Greek schools collaborate to write on local history
- Israel: It’s a win win project: An interview with Sivan Lerer, a teacher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Germany: Open Science Fellows Program launched in Germany
- Basque Country: Students go wikipedian in the Basque Country
- Norway: Third term of Wikipedia editing at the University of Oslo
- Macedonia: First Wiki Club in Macedonia
- Global: Articles of interest in other publications
To get involved with the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. To browse past issues, please visit the archives.
Home • Subscribe • Archives • Newsroom - The newsletter team 18:51, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
- ↑ Link to the course page at the TAU website (in Hebrew) - http://www2.tau.ac.il/yedion/syllabus.asp?course=1880180101&year=2015