The Signpost

News and notes

Commons grant, license change, new chapters, usability and more

Ford Foundation grant for Commons

The Ford Foundation has awarded a $300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation with the aim of "improving our [Wikimedia's] interfaces and workflows for multimedia uploading", particularly with respect to Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. According to a press release, the grant will "fund a project team to study challenges faced by new participants in Wikimedia Commons, as well as to identify best practices from other media sharing websites. Following a research phase, the team will design and implement a simple upload work-flow, enabling users to easily upload files, select licenses, and provide descriptions." Erik Moeller, the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, notes in a blog post, that Wikimedia has "also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia chapters about possible models for working together on the execution of this project". The grant proposal in full.

Licensing changes rolled out across projects

While the English Wikipedia's sitenotices were updated on June 15 to reflect the licensing change (see previous articles), the update was not made on all Wikimedia projects until June 30. Projects like WikiProject Citizendium Porting have sprung up after this development that allows material from CC-BY-SA sites to be imported. Editors on Wikimedia sites that now dual-license, such as on the English Wikipedia, are reminded that new content can no longer be imported from sites only licensing under the GFDL. Blog post.

New chapters

Three new chapters have been approved by the Wikimedia Board, according to a message from Michael Snow on Foundation-l. The new chapters are Wikimedia Danmark (Denmark), Wikimedia Portugal (Portugal) and Wikimedia Ukraine (Ukraine). Wikimedia Denmark and Wikimedia Ukraine were both founded this year, while Wikimedia Portugal has been in development since 2008.

New skin, redesigned search page available from Usability project

Parts of the first release from the Wikimedia Usability Project, codenamed Acai, have begun to appear on the English Wikipedia this week. The first of these changes was an improved search page, featuring a simplified layout for searching and creating pages where an appropriate result is not found. The new search page also features links for searching different namespaces.

A new skin, named "Vector", is also available to registered users via their preferences. The new skin features redesigned tabs, a search box in the right-hand corner, and a redesigned search page, among other changes. An enhanced editing toolbar is also available. Both of these aim to be less confusing to a new editor, but these are yet to be rolled out on a large scale. The short and long term plans for rolling out these changes were documented earlier this week on the Wikimedia Techblog.

Update: Following performance issues, some or all of the above may no longer be available. For the latest information, consult the technical village pump.

Briefly

Milestones

Includes milestones for the last two weeks

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-06/News_and_notes