A cross section of a leaf showing the phloem, xylem, sclerenchyma, collenchyma and mesophyll.

In 2012 Wikimedia Commons contributor Kelvinsong created and contributed election-return diagrams during the United States elections to the freely licensed database. Kelvinsong credits encouragement at the time from another user, LadyofHats, for inspiring him to donate his talents and for making him one of the only scientific illustrators on Commons.

“My first science picture was a large diagram of the animal cell cycle, which somehow managed to make Featured Picture,” said Kelvinsong, who has also been surprised to find his pictures on T-shirts and coffee mugs being sold online. “Who would buy a lunchbox with the centrosome cycle on it?”

And while some illustrators might be bothered by this, Kelvinsong has a different outlook. “The concept of copyright has never really made much sense to me, and Commons is a great place to get your stuff out into the world. Not only is it awesome to be able to add your pictures to Wikipedia articles that are seen by thousands of people per day, it’s cool to see other websites pick up your pictures and use them. In my experience, 60-80 percent of them will give you credit for your work.”

Viewing himself as an amateur illustrator who also does photography, Kelvinsong has created vector illustrations since he was 13. He specializes in microscope photos and plant cell biology, though he has trouble identifying individual plants.

“Commons is severely lacking in plant microscopy photos, but I managed to find representatives of each cell type,” he said. “I take scientific accuracy very seriously, so I usually do a ton of research on the topic, and I wound up combing through a lot of plant science papers to figure out exactly what each cell looks like and to get the scale somewhat right.”

He said Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell are his two favorite journals due to their large collections and open-access policies.

To illustrate the image above, which was selected Wikimedia Commons Picture of The Day for July 27, Kelvinsong first made a wireframe render with Blender, then traced that in Inkscape. After the picture was complete, he wrote the captions and manually line broke the text, which he says is a big part of making these diagrams. Lastly, he did some grid aligning to make the image appear sharper at certain resolutions, then outlined the text so it looks good after the rendering process on Commons.

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MediaWiki, the software that powers the Wikimedia movement sites, is a remarkable piece of engineering. Not only does it support the very specific use cases of the various projects (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, etc), but it is also used by many other individuals and organizations spanning the entire range of institutional size, from the biggest multinational firm to the smallest boutique site. Those third-parties (users outside Wikimedia) are an important part of the MediaWiki ecosystem, as they provide added testing and development time to the project.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce that we have contracted with two long-time members of the MediaWiki community–Mark Hershberger and Markus Glaser–to manage and drive forward third-party focused releases of MediaWiki.

Over a month ago, the Wikimedia Foundation sent out a request for proposals (RFP) to help us fill an important and underserved role in the development of MediaWiki. Two very solid proposals were produced, the community weighed in with questions and comments, and there was an open IRC office hour with the authors and interested community members. The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased with the outcome of this RFP and excited to begin this new chapter in the life of MediaWiki.

Mark and Markus bring a wealth of knowledge to this endeavor, as they are both MediaWiki contractors helping others set up, use, and do unique customizations of MediaWiki on a daily basis. They certainly know what third-party users of MediaWiki want.

“We are excited to work with the Foundation to enable the community of developers to respond in a more agile way to third-party MediaWiki users,” Mark said about the opportunity. ”Together, we will develop the next generation of MediaWiki software and build strategic and lasting relationships with Open Source organizations and third-party wikis.”

Mark and Markus will be working on various things, especially leading the efforts to make new tarball releases of the software, to improve the continuous integration infrastructure, to shepherd through changes to extension maintenance, and to collaborate with others as they add documentation for third-party users. All of their progress will be documented on the MediaWiki wiki for others to follow along and help.

Please join me in congratulating Mark and Marcus. We’re very excited to see what they will accomplish!

Greg Grossmeier
Release Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Have you ever looked up something quickly on Wikipedia on your phone, noticed a small mistake, and wished you could fix it on the spot? Or maybe you didn’t realize that you could contribute? Now you can help keep Wikipedia and its sister projects up-to-date and accurate when you’re on the go by editing from your phone.

Wikipedia’s quality content is built by ordinary people all over the world watching and editing articles every day. Anyone with a computer can edit, but with over 15% of our users accessing Wikipedia on mobile devices and growing, the Wikimedia Foundation had to do more to let anyone with Internet access contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. For this reason, we’ve just released a new feature: editing for mobile.

As a trial, the first version of mobile editing requires a Wikimedia account. To get started, look for the pencil icon. If you don’t have an account, don’t worry, it’s quick and easy to create one on desktop or mobile! Once you’re logged in, you can use the pencil next to any section to make changes to that section.

For our first release, our primary goal was to create a fast, intuitive editing experience for new users and experienced editors alike, while still sticking with markup editing for now. We started simple so we could observe our users’ needs and expectations.

We’ve already seen an encouraging number of users try out editing on our experimental beta site, where we first built the feature. Now that it’s available for all users, we hope to learn more about the kinds of edits people make on mobile and build more advanced features, including possible VisualEditor integration, in future releases.

We spent a lot of time testing the new mobile editor and trying to make it work on as many devices as possible, but this is still the first release. We would love to hear your feedback, any suggestions you have, and any problems you encounter, so we can continue to improve this feature. Tell us what you think on Twitter @WikimediaMobile.

If you love Wikipedia and have an Internet-enabled phone, give mobile editing a try. If you’ve never edited Wikipedia before, now is a great time to start – it’s quicker and easier than ever before. Help us make Wikipedia and its new mobile editor better!

Juliusz Gonera
Software engineer, mobile web

Wikipedia Zero is now available in India

It is our mission to provide free access to knowledge for everyone in the world. It’s only fitting then that today we announced our first Wikipedia Zero partnership launch in India, the world’s second most populous country with over 1.2 billion people.  Our new partnership with Aircel will give 60 million mobile subscribers in India the potential to access Wikipedia at no data cost, bringing the program’s global partnership footprint to 470 million subscribers.

While mobile penetration in India is over 70 percent (867 million subscribers), the total Internet audience of India is only 77 million people (Comscore, June 2013), roughly the same as Japan (73 million, Comscore June 2013) – a country with 1/10th the population.  Infrastructural and economic barriers in India, where income per capita is 1/30th that of Japan, have led to this divide in information access.  However, the proliferation of mobile – and programs like Wikipedia Zero – will change that. Already, India has passed Japan to become the third largest smartphone market in the world.

The challenge in enabling knowledge access in India is not just about distribution and cost, though; it’s also about language. India has no national language, but there are 22 recognized official languages in the country. Many Indians are not only accessing the internet for the first time on mobile, but also non-English content is becoming accessible for the first time via mobile.

Hindi Wikipedia, for example, currently has 22.1 percent of page views globally coming from mobile compared to 17.3 percent for all other languages ^.[1]  We hope to further catalyze this transformation as Wikipedia users on Aircel can access English, Hindi, Tamil or any of the other 17 Indic language Wikipedias without being charged data fees ^.[2]

To meet our commitment to bringing free knowledge to everyone in the world, we need to break down the barriers that prevent access. With Wikipedia Zero officially available today on Aircel in India, we’re one step closer to that objective.

Amit Kapoor
Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships, Wikimedia Foundation

Notes

1. From stats.wikimedia.org, June 2013: Hindi Wikipedia page views (2.1M mobile /9.5M all); Wikipedia worldwide (3,672M mobile/21,229M all)
2. A phone or browser must have the capability to render an Indic font in order to access non-English versions.
   

Screenshot of Miga

I’m one of the recipients of the first-ever round of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grants for a project that I initially titled the “MediaWiki Data Browser“. The project started about three months ago, and we’re now just a little past the halfway mark. I’m very excited to announce the first release of the software I’ve been working on, now called the Miga Data Viewer, or Miga for short.

My website has information about the code and usage of the software, and I have a longer description of the project on the WikiWorks blog, but in brief:

Miga (pronounced MEE-ga) is a generic framework that can be used to browse and navigate structured data in a (hopefully) user-friendly way. The core of the software is not actually MediaWiki or Wikipedia-specific; it reads data from arbitrary CSV files (and it is open source). However, the code also contains “importer” scripts that can extract data from Wikipedia, Wikidata and other MediaWiki-based wikis, and turn them into CSV files. In this way, users of Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites can hopefully easily create their own Miga apps, for whatever subset of data they want users to be able to navigate. There are a few demos on the site that illustrate this: apps for browsing information about fictional nonhumans, jazz musicians, public parks and sports cars using information from the English-language Wikipedia, and one for browsing information about countries using facts from Wikidata.

When a user first accesses a data set, the data is all imported into the browser itself, using a technology called Web SQL Database. The downside is that Miga apps will not work on Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers (and possibly some other minor browsers), because those browsers don’t support Web SQL. The upside is that, on all other browsers, Miga apps run quite fast, and can keep working if the network connection is spotty or nonexistent, a difference that really makes itself felt when browsing on a mobile device.

There’s another demo app I created that holds schedule information for the upcoming Wikimania 2013 conference in Hong Kong. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the demo that gets a lot of the initial buzz, and it could be that its use as a lightweight framework for creating conference and event apps will be the “killer app” (to the extent that there is one) for Miga to start with. I’m not aware of any other tools that allow for creating a conference app in this sort of lightweight way. Personally, I find the Wikipedia-accessing stuff a lot more compelling, but you never know what will really spark users’ interest.

I’d like to thank the IEG project and team (especially Siko Bouterse) for their support. And I hope people try out Miga for themselves. I think it could lead to a lot of interesting discoveries, as people “unlock” the data contained in Wikipedia infoboxes and elsewhere.

Yaron Koren
Founder/CEO, WikiWorks

Birds on stick, Shanghai, Qibao

Qibao is an ancient “water town” on the outskirts of Shanghai, China, and it’s where Wikimedia Commons photographer Jakub Hałun (User: Jakubhal) discovered the subject matter for his photo “Birds on Sticks,” a display in one of many food stalls along a crowded market street.

“I was sent to Shanghai for a few months because of my work, and I treated this as an opportunity to see as much of China as I could,” said Hałun. “I traveled every weekend, sometimes to very remote places, but on this particular day, I didn’t want to travel far.”

The Qibao suburb of Shanghai is located in the Minhang District and was built during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1126). Qibao translates to “seven treasures,” referring to the lore of the town once housing historical treasures, of which a Gold Lotus Scripture and a Big Bell remain.

Qibao has not lost its ancient fascination with crickets and cricket fighting, with two of the fiercest cricket species found in the wild nearby. The town is home to a special cricket museum, with live cricket fighting shows, and a festival of cricket culture occurs annually, in May and October.

Most of Hałun’s pictures on Commons feature historic monuments and architecture, but he especially likes to take pictures of special events and people on the street.

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Wikipedia isn’t written just by humans! Bots have made great contributions to Wikipedia and other wikis like Wikidata (where bots have made over 90 percent of the edits so far). “Bots” are automated editing programs that can do anything from archiving discussions to reverting vandalism and  creating articles. Some bots even patrol new pages and report to Wikimedians.

How can you operate a bot? There are several ways and frameworks to run a bot, but the most popular is Pywikipediabot. It’s written in the Python programming language and has been in use since 2003. Pywikipediabot contains scripts for moving categories, creating articles, checking new images, working with Wikidata items and many other tasks. Besides the existing scripts, you can also create your own bot using generic scripts and classes (like “Page,” which handles Wikipedia pages in general).

Pywikipedia is now joining many other Wikimedia-related software tools and taking a big step forward by changing its version control system from SVN to Git. After July 26, developers will be able to easily submit their patches directly to Gerrit to help maintain the code.

If you’re already a bot operator, you should know that after that date, SVN checkouts won’t be updated and you’ll need to switch to git; we’re providing a manual to help with the process.

If you’re interested in working with us, there are several help pages in different languages. You can also contact us through our mailing list and the IRC channel.

Amir Sarabadani (User:Ladsgroup), editor on the Persian Wikipedia and pywikipedia developer

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013 is well underway on the coding phase. Four projects this year are related to various aspects of MediaWiki and Wikimedia internationalization initiatives. On completion of these 4 projects, we expect to present:

• an Android app for MediaWiki translation,
• browser extensions for the input methods in jQuery.ime (Project Milkshake),
• Right-to-Left language support in the VisualEditor, and
• a dashboard for Wikimedia language projects

These projects are being mentored by members of the Wikimedia Language Engineering team along with members from the WMF Mobile and VisualEditor teams. In this post, we touch base with each of the projects about the challenges that they have faced so far and on their accomplishments.

MediaWiki VisualEditor internationalization and right-to-left languages support

A screenshot of a draft version of the VisualEditor language inspector.

Moriel Schottlender is working on adding better support for non-English languages to the VisualEditor. Her project consists of two main parts. The first is triaging and fixing bugs in handling right-to-left text reported by volunteer editors who test the currently deployed version of the editor in languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. She has already fixed several bugs such as moving the cursor in the correct direction using the arrow keys and adapting the design of VisualEditor’s dialog boxes to right-to-left layout. The other part of the project is developing a “language inspector”–a tool for setting the language of a piece of text in an article. This is needed very frequently in Wikipedias in all languages to set properties such as font, size or direction of a foreign name or quotation. Nowadays it is done using a multitude of templates and HTML tags, and Moriel’s project will make it easy and unified.

jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and Chrome

Part of Project Milkshake, jQuery.ime is an input method library. Making a good start, Praveen Singh has already implemented working jQuery.ime extensions for both Chrome and Firefox. Rather than loading all input methods at once, input method scripts are loaded only when the user selects a particular input method. The jQuery.ime and jQuery.uls upstream projects were added as git submodules in the extensions. This will provide a way to synchronize the extensions with the upstream projects in the future by simply updating the respective submodule. Universal Language Selector (ULS) has been successfully integrated in the extensions, thus providing the users with an easy way to choose among different languages. The extension remembers a user’s most recently selected languages and their corresponding input methods, and offers an easy way to choose among those languages.

Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard

The Language Coverage Matrix dashboard was a project conceived during the last Open Source Language Summit held in Pune, India earlier this year. The project began as a shared spreadsheet and over the next few months, the data was filtered to uniquely identify the internationalization support status for each language and its variants. The dashboard will provide an interface to search this data and present visual data representations. The test instance set up by Harsh Kothari on wmflabs, showcases the search features. The spreadsheet data has been ported to a MySQL database. Plans for the coming few weeks include additional query implementation, code refactoring and start of the visualization representations.

Phone app for MediaWiki translation

The Translate extension is used for translating MediaWiki content. This project will bring the convenience of this widely used extension as an Android app. The iPhone app created by the student Or Sagi, is already available for download and testing. The similarly designed Android app will provide features for translation and proofreading. Due to conflicts with examination schedules, major work on this project will effectively start from late July.

Getting more updates

More details about the progress of each of these projects can be found on the project home pages. The students and mentors also meet up every week for demos. Please let them know if you’d like to be part of any of these sessions.

Runa Bhattacharjee
Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation

Sickla kaj, Södra Hammarbyhamnen, Stockholm.

Many people have seen Arild Vågen’s (ArildV) photography and may not have known it. Vågen is a regular contributor to Wikimedia Commons and his photos have been used by newspapers, websites, authors and even the Svea Court of Appeal, all because he freely licenses the images and donates them to the database.

The photo above of the Sickla kaj is one of those beautiful images and has been selected as the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day for July 22, 2013. The image, Vågen explains, was taken as a storm passed his home in Stockholm. “It was a rainy day, but in the late evening the rain had stopped. I saw this beautiful light from my apartment, and went for a short walk with my camera to capture it,” he says.

Vågen’s photos have been featured numerous times on the Wikimedia Commons home page (and on the Wikimedia blog). They are the result of his good eye and talent, but some of Vågen’s favorite contributions to Commons have also been facilitated by Wikimedia Sweden’s Technology Pool.

In January 2013, the Swedish Wikimedia chapter created a collective “Technology Pool” to improve article quality and overall participation on the Wikimedia projects. The pool operates much like a public library, where users are able to check out pieces of equipment ranging from DSLRs, to video cameras, and sound equipment, completely free of charge. The only requirement is that the results are uploaded to Commons.

Vågen says that the Technology Pool is a major asset to Wikimedia Sweden. “Some technology might be too expensive for the regular person,” he notes, which can hinder participation in Commons. “Before, I just used simple compact cameras,” he says.

The Technology Pool has had a significant impact on the number of quality photographs, videos, and audio files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and subsequently, Wikipedia. It has facilitated coverage of important events, including interviews with Nobel Laureates, and the popular 2013 Eurovision Song Contest.

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75+ attend Wikimedia’s “Law, Tech & Social Change” event.

On July 10, 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a panel discussion on the topic of “Law, Tech and Social Change.” The event was open to the public, but aimed primarily toward legal and policy interns in the technology/Internet industry. The goal of the evening was to explore the role of lawyers and policy advisors in helping drive social change in the technology industry, whether through traditional or nontraditional advisory roles. (Watch the video and check out our photos.)

The event took place in Wikimedia’s San Francisco office and featured an opening presentation by Wikimedia General Counsel Geoff Brigham, followed by a panel of technology law and policy experts, including: Cindy Cohn (Legal Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation); Jishnu Menon (Product & Data Counsel, Mozilla); Derek Slater (Policy Manager, Google); Amy Keating (Litigation Counsel, Twitter); and Luis Villa (Deputy General Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation). Approximately 75 legal and policy interns, lawyers, policy advisers, and other interested parties attended the panel and reception that followed.

Geoff Brigham delivered a presentation on his experience as General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. He spoke about ways in which the Wikimedia community has advocated for social change, as well as ways in which the Legal Department at the Wikimedia Foundation has been able to support the Foundation and the Wikimedia community.

Geoff emphasized the role of the community in driving social change, as well as the importance of collaborating with like-minded organizations, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge, and organizations abroad.

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