The second issue of the Wikimedia Quarto Archived 2005-06-12 at the Wayback Machine, covering the last quarter of 2004, was released last Saturday, 19 March.

The Wikimedia Quarto was begun in September 2004 as the official newsletter of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Quarto's goal is to distribute regular updates about the Foundation's activities as widely as possible, and to provide a forum for Jimmy Wales, the Board, and the projects to report on important events.

The first goal of the Quarto is to publish quarterly in 10 languages, and to include original content related to Wikimedia from project members, essayists, and great thinkers in related fields. The intended audience includes contributors to Wikimedia projects and people interested in Wikimedia Foundation activities.

For this issue, Quarto editor-in-chief Samuel Klein tracked down Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, founder and chairman of Creative Commons, for an exclusive interview. In a whirlwind session, Lessig talked about copyright, copyleft, barriers to free culture, legal pitfalls for Wikipedia, and fighting the good fight.

The publication of the current issue was somewhat delayed, partly because of the winter holidays, but also due to a dramatic increase in length over the previous issue - more than half again as much text. Ruth Ifcher, Alno, Arnomane, KMT, Li-sung, and the rest of a growing proofreading team helped to clean up the double-length issue. Thanks to Aphaia, the new translation coordinator, and over 50 translators, the Quarto is being released in five languages: Czech, English Archived 2005-06-12 at the Wayback Machine, Spanish, French, and Italian, with Polish, Portuguese, Japanese and German to be finished over the coming week.

To discuss how the newsletter is published, or the contents of the next newsletter, see the current Quarto talk page. All editors are invited to help build the forthcoming issue, which is expected to be significantly shorter. The Quarto team hopes to focus on improving the different steps of publishing an article, and emphasizing the proofreading stage.

Contacts :

• m:user:sj (Samuel Klein)
• m:user:Aphaia (translation coordination)

Please post your feedback to m:Talk:WQ.