Today Airtel and the Wikimedia Foundation announced a partnership to launch Wikipedia Zero, an initiative to provide free access to Wikipedia on mobile phones. This partnership with Airtel will help provide Wikipedia access to 70 million new users in sub-saharan Africa, starting in Kenya.

One exciting aspect of this partnership is that we are reaching a group of people we’ve never been able to reach before: mobile phone customers who don’t have internet access.

Throughout most of the developing world, data-enabled smartphones are the exception, not the rule. That means billions of people currently cannot see Wikipedia on their phones. Which phones? Low-cost basic phones (usually called feature phones or candy-bar phones). Phones like this:

So the challenge is, how do we reach the billions of people in the world who aren’t on the internet?

With text messaging. Even phones like these can send and receive text messages.

So for the first time, we are testing a service to allow access to Wikipedia articles via text message. It can work with any phone, even the most basic feature phone. You don’t even need an application.

How does Wikipedia via text work? A search is started in the same way people already use their phone to check their balance or add airtime. To search for a Wikipedia article through the Airtel partnership, a subscriber simply dials *515# on their phone, and they’ll get a text message inviting them to search Wikipedia. The subscriber enters a topic (like ‘Cheetah’) in the same manner they would send a text message.
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The Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Operations team is seeking proposals on the provisioning of a new datacenter facility.

After working through the specifics internally, we now have a public RFP posted and ready for proposals. We invite any organization meeting the requirements outlined to submit a proposal for review. Most of the relevant details are in the document itself, but feel free to reach out to myself or anyone on the Technical Operations team should anyone have any questions.

On Wikimedia projects, audio and video content has traditionally taken a backseat relative to text and static images (however, changes are underway). Conversely, more and more scholarly publications come with audio and video files, though these are — a legacy from the print era — typically relegated to the “supplementary material” rather than embedded next to the relevant text passages. And a rising number of these publications are Open Access, i.e. freely available under Creative Commons licenses that allow for the materials to be reused in other contexts.

Why not enrich thematically related Wikimedia pages with such multimedia files? That’s where the Open Access Media Importer (OAMI) comes in. It makes scientific video and audio clips accessible to the Wikimedia community and a broader public audience. The OAMI is an open-source program (or ‘bot’) that crawls PubMed Central — a full-text database of over 3 million biomedical research articles — and extracts multimedia files from those publications in the database that are available under Wikimedia-compatible licenses.

Such reuse-friendly terms are the key ingredient to making scholarly materials useful beyond the article in which they have originally been published. However, OAMI aims to make this material even more useful by making it accessible:

• in places where people actually look for them (Wikimedia platforms are a prime example),
• in one coherent format (in our case Ogg Vorbis/Theora, which isn’t encumbered by patent restrictions), and
• in a way that allows for collaborative annotation with relevant metadata. This makes it a lot easier to browse and search the media files.

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Yale Law School Library

Yesterday, I presented an Ideas Lunch talk hosted by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (Yale ISP). The Yale ISP was formed in 1997 to study how law and society are affected by new technologies and the Internet. The project is “guided by the values of democracy, development, and civil liberties.” I spoke about my work at the Wikimedia Foundation to promote the free knowledge movement to a group of students, faculty, and fellows at Yale ISP.

The talk focused on some of the unique challenges that our legal team faces in protecting the decentralized Wikimedia projects. In my work managing the Wikimedia trademark portfolio, I constantly think about creative solutions to reconcile the requirements of trademark law with the open and collaborative nature of our movement. We are currently developing a trademark policy together with our community through a series of community consultations. The purpose of the trademark policy is to allow community members to easily use the Wikimedia marks to promote our mission while protecting the marks from abuse by others. This is no easy feat as trademark policies are usually written to broadly restrict use of marks. Attorneys typically only consider the input of a few key staff when formulating policies of this sort. In stark contrast, we are collaborating with many different community members in an open process to develop a policy that is intended to serve the needs of the entire community. We also write the policy to be particularly user-friendly, applying readability indices to make sure that we avoid legalese and express ourselves clearly. This weekend, we also held two workshops at Stanford Institute of Design and the Embassy Network with legal design researchers to think about how we can better visualize the policy to make it more intuitive.[1]

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Aubrey, Micru, MarkTraceur, and Amire80 during Wikimania 2013.

With the grant period for the Wikisource strategic vision process reaching its conclusion, we would like to make two major announcements. We’re happy to introduce the open survey for Wikisource contributors and supporters (translated by volunteer community members into 11 languages). The survey is a great way for the community to voice its opinion regarding Wikisource and its future. We  hope you will spend 10 minutes filling it out. It’s worth it.

The second announcement is that Aubrey and Micru, will continue our volunteering efforts to kick-start the Wikisource User Group for one more month. Except for the final name (pending approval from the Wikimedia Foundation legal team), all necessary steps have been taken to assure that all Wikisourcerors can use this association to find and shape development priorities, and as a way to have international coordination.

We attended Wikimania and Google Summer of Code projects. The Wikimania days were as hectic as they were productive. Aubrey participated in the Open Access panel, and presented Wikisource as a positive tool for the scientific community, provided that Wikisource users possess a desire to support digital-born documents. Micru participated in several discussions about how Wikidata can support bibliographic information and how it can all come together with external organizations.

With regards to the Google Summer of Code projects, you can read the final reports from the grantees that worked hard during the summer months on projects that can be used for Wikisource:

• Improve support for book structures by Molly White.
• Refactoring of ProofreadPage extension by Aarti Dwivedi
• Extension:Annotator by Richa Jain
• UploadWizard: Book upload customization by Nazmul Chowdhury

David Cuenca (User:Micru)
Andrea Zanni (User:Aubrey) 

This post is available in 2 languages:

العربية  • English

In English

“Wikipedia Zero – Umniah” by Pshegubj, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

Umniah is the latest mobile operator to join the Wikipedia Zero free knowledge movement, and our first partner to launch in Jordan. Now Umniah’s 2.7 million mobile subscribers can access Wikipedia in Arabic and English free of data charges.

Nart Abdullah, Senior Value Added Services Officer at Umniah, came to us after hearing about Wikipedia Zero in the news. Umniah has a history of initiatives to reduce the digital gap, and Wikipedia Zero is in line with their values of community and inclusivity. According to CEO Ihab Hinnawi, Umniah is happy to provide free access to Wikipedia as “an important gateway to helping educate members of society, specifically ones facing financial burdens.” (Press release)

I recently joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Mobile Programs, and Umniah is the first mobile operator I helped launch. I’m impressed with the way the Umniah team has embraced the program. They did a teaser campaign on their Facebook page asking general trivia questions leading up to the Wikipedia Zero announcement. That simple campaign captures the essence of Wikipedia opening a world of knowledge at your fingertips. And they even made a video about the partnership.

I’m also impressed with the Wikipedia Zero team and honored to be a part of it. We have a small and very talented group of people who work hard on implementations and infrastructure. We’re scaling our efforts to meet the growing commitments from mobile operators. So far we’ve rolled out in 19 countries, and we have agreements with carriers to serve over half a billion people.

Thanks again to Umniah, and welcome to the free knowledge movement. We’re glad you’re here (and I’m really glad to be here, too).

Carolynne Schloeder
Director of Mobile Programs, Wikimedia Foundation

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Major news in September include:

• A recap on how our engineers worked with volunteers to improve language tools at Wikimania;
• A call for wikis willing to experiment with using HTTPS for all users;
• A recap on how our new image scaling system was implemented by a volunteer developer;
• A call for technical projects that could for instance be completed as part of our mentorship programs;
• Design experiments to show the community behind Wikipedia articles on mobile devices;
• Another release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle, with an explanation of how it’s put together;
• The completion of the sixth round of the Outreach Program for Women;
• A recap of the launch of Notifications to more language versions of Wikipedia, and their impact.

Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

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Notifications inform you of new activity that affects you on Wikipedia and let you take quick action.

We’re happy to announce the release of the Notifications feature on dozens of Wikipedias in many languages!

Notifications inform users of new activity that affects them, such as talk page messages or mentions of their names. It was developed this year by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Team.

New languages

In recent weeks, we enabled Notifications on wikis in two dozen languages, including Wikipedia in the Dutch, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, to name but a few. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out this engagement tool to many more sites, and we expect it to be enabled on most Wikimedia wikis by the end of 2013.

Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and regions. Users are responding particularly well to social features such as Mentions and Thanks (see below), which enable them to communicate more effectively than before.

For each release, we reached out to community members weeks in advance, inviting them to translate and discuss the tool with their peers. As a result, we have now formed productive relationships with volunteer groups in each project, and are very grateful for their generous support. We find this collaborative approach very effective and hope to expand on these partnerships for other product releases in the future.

New platforms

Notifications are now available on mobile devices as well. This will allow mobile users to stay up-to-date on events and activities that affect them on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

For this project, we were also glad to introduce HTML email to Wikipedia, to provide a more appealing user experience, with clear visual cues and less clutter than the plain text emails used until now.

We believe that supporting new platforms and formats like these is key to engaging millions of new users, who expect a modern notification experience across all their platforms.
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Rachel Thomas at work.

Round 6 of the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women (OPW) has been successfully completed. Our intern, Rachel Thomas worked remotely from Boston (MA, USA) on Browser Test Automation for VisualEditor in a full-time Summer internship. For more detail on her work, check her wrap-up blog post, her project reports and her code contributions.

In total, 37 women took part in this OPW round, working with 16 open source projects including the Linux Kernel, Mozilla and WordPress.

There was only one Wikimedia intern in this round, but only because seven others were also participating in parallel in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). There were 6 interns in the previous editions and we plan (tentatively) to fund 8 positions in the next round, expected to start at the beginning of 2014.

While GSoC interns are paid by Google, in OPW the funds come mainly from the organizations participating in the program. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we’re starting to work on the next round. We consider that OPW is playing an important role in bridging the gender gap in our technical community. In the previous seven years, only one woman got a GSoC internship at Wikimedia. This year, more than a third of our interns were women (8 out of 21).

To make sure that this becomes a trend and not just an exception, we need your help!

• Spread the news about the program, and encourage your tech friends to join when applications open. Remember that, in many cases, we have to break well-established social inertia: many more women will do the first step if they receive a personal invitation.
• Propose a technical project, even if it’s a rough idea. We will help you polish it.
• Volunteer as a technical mentor. Women are welcome! We want to close the gender gap at the mentorship level as well.
• Fund an intern. Chapters and other organizations willing to pool resources with the Wikimedia Foundation are welcome.

We also welcome ideas to promote other profiles typically underrepresented or discriminated against in technical projects. We strive for equal opportunities, and we believe that diversity will make our community stronger and our projects better. If you agree, get a head start by exploring how to contribute! It will increase your chances of being selected when you apply.

Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

The MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) is a collection of MediaWiki extensions for various internationalization features. These extensions and the Bundle are maintained by the Wikimedia Language Engineering team. Each month, a new version of the Bundle is released.

The MLEB gives webmasters who run sites with MediaWiki a convenient solution to install, manage and upgrade language tools. The monthly release cycle allows for adequate testing and compatibility across the recent stable versions of MediaWiki.

A plate depicting text in Sanskrit (Devanagari script) and Pali languages, from the Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift by Johann Christoph Carl Faulmann

The extensions that form MLEB can be used to create a multilingual wiki:

• UniversalLanguageSelector — allows users to configure their language preferences easily;
• Translate — allows a MediaWiki page to be translated;
• CLDR — is a data repository for language-specific locale data like date, time, currency etc. (used by the other extensions);
• Babel — provides information about language proficiency on user pages;
• LocalisationUpdate — updates MediaWiki’s multilingual user interface;
• CleanChanges — shows RecentChanges in a way that reflects translations more clearly.

The Bundle can be downloaded as a tarball or from the Wikimedia Gerrit repository. Release announcements are generally made on the last Wednesday of the month, and details of the changes can be found in the Release Notes.

Before every release, the extensions are tested against the last two stable versions of MediaWiki on several browsers. Some extensions, such as UniversalLanguageSelector and Translate, need extensive testing due to their wide range of features. The tests are prepared as Given-When-Then scenarios, i.e. an action is checked for an expected outcome assuming certain conditions are met. Some of these tests are in the process of being automated using Selenium WebDriver and the remaining tests are run manually.

The automated tests currently run only on Mozilla Firefox. For the manual test runs, the Given-When-Then scenarios are replicated across several web browsers. These are mostly the Grade-A level supported browsers. Regressions or bugs are reported through Bugzilla. If time permits, they are also fixed before the monthly release, or otherwise scheduled to be fixed in the next one.

The MLEB release process allows several opportunities for participation in the development of internationalization tools. The testing workflow introduces the participants to the features of the commonly-used extensions. Finding and tracking the bugs on Bugzilla familiarizes them with the bug lifecycle and also provides an opportunity to work closely with the developers while the bugs are being fixed. Creating a patch of code to fix the bug is the next exciting step of exploration that the new participants are always encouraged to continue.

If you’d like to participate in testing, we now have a document that will help you get started with the manual tests. Alternatively, you could also help in writing the automated tests (using Cucumber and Ruby). The newest version of MLEB has been released and is now ready for download.

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