Diff (blog)

Wikimedia Foundation staff and contractors participate with the volunteer community in maintaining this page's content.

Diff is a Wikimedia-community-focused blog platform, established by the Communications department at the Wikimedia Foundation. It hosts community storytelling and learning at diff.wikimedia.org. With Diff, we are promoting the sorts of enriching exchanges by welcoming people from every background to build strong and diverse communities, breaking down the barriers for entry to our movement, and focusing our efforts on facilitating collaboration, including from communities that are new to our movement.

Background

Diff builds on the experiences of the Wikimedia Blog, the Wikimedia Foundation News, and Wikimedia Space, and it offers a combined archive of over 4,000 posts from these channels. Diff aims to become a predominantly community-authored platform, in which volunteers can share their stories, learnings, and ideas with each other. Learning from others has been essential for development of the wiki movement.

The name of the new community blog is "Diff" – named after the wiki interface for showing the difference between two revisions of a page. It is also a nod to the difference our communities make in the world every day.

Mission statement

Diff enables a predominantly community-authored platform for sharing and learning by and for the Wikimedia movement. Diff has an inviting and simple editorial process to encourage participation from all – especially emerging and under-represented communities. Content can be written and translated into languages to reach a wide audience.

We are using existing off-the-shelf technological solutions and plans for integration with Wikimedia wikis to allow for expansion into common volunteer workflows.

Objectives

Help community members share and learn from one another across geographies, languages, and areas of interest.
Increase the diversity of voices and involvement in community discussions and activities.
Provide a wellspring of storytelling opportunities for Comms work from communities and individuals.
Welcoming and safe to newcomers. Friendly interface, familiar features, encouraging participation, and a code of conduct.
A central place for volunteers to learn about foundation activities, from new products, experiments, consultations, and more.

Scope

The scope of the Diff Blog is news about the Wikimedia movement, for the Wikimedia movement. Some examples:

News produced by committees and affiliates, like the ones posted in wikimedia-l.
Links to interesting Wikimedia stories and discussions published in other channels.
News about Wikimedia partners, the ecosystem of free knowledge and other current events that are connected with the Wikimedia movement and are targeted to Wikimedia contributors.
Announcements, requests for feedback, reports, newsletters… produced by the Wikimedia Foundation for community audiences.

News with an unclear impact on the Wikimedia movement and opinion articles are out of scope.

Audiences

Diff is internally focused toward community members, affiliates, and projects who want to share their experiences with others and invite those outside their normal channels of activity into their own efforts.

Externally speaking, Diff allows for the movement to share with the rest of the world its breadth and flurry of activity.

Structure

A blog using WordPress VIP hosting where contributors can log in with their Wikimedia account to submit drafts
Category-based navigation to highlight strategic interest areas of content
An open and minimal editorial process whereby volunteers and staff can submit blog posts for inclusion in their own voice

Calendar

Diff has a calendar feature where anyone in the Wikimedia movement can add events. More information can be found at Diff (blog)/Calendar.

Compliments, comments, and questions

Please start a new topic on the talk page or email the project team at diff wikimedia.org

Bug reports and feature requests

Bug reports and feature requests can be made on Phabricator. Please add the #diff-blog tag when creating new tasks.

Code

A public repository of the Diff theme can be found on Github.

A public mirror of the code that makes Diff work can be found on Github.