New hires, German Wikipedian dies, new book tool, and more
New hires
Several new hires at the Wikimedia Foundation were announced in the last week.
Guillaume Paumier (user:guillom) has joined the Usability project, as the Product Manager for the Ford multimedia usability grant project (see previous story).
Pete Forsyth (User:Peteforsyth) has been hired as Wikimedia's first Public Outreach Officer. According to the announcement, he will work on "all of the Foundation's public outreach activities, including the development of educational materials (Bookshelf Project), the development of public outreach related grant proposals and the communication of volunteer-led outreach activities to a global audience".
Moka Pantages has been hired as a communications officer at the Foundation. She will work on communications projects, reporting to Jay Walsh.
Additionally, two people, William Pietri and Howie Fung, have been hired on a contract basis to help with the deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia, according to a message from Erik Moeller.
German Wikipedia editor dies unexpectedly
User:Bradypus (Joachim Miesbauer), a long-time editor of the German Wikipedia, died unexpectedly on October 24 from a heart attack at the age of 38, according to reports from German Wikipedians. There is a condolences page on Wikipedia.
Bradypus had been an editor since 2004. His username came from the brown-throated Sloth (Bradypus variegatus), and he was very active in editing articles about mammals, particularly about primates. He was awarded the Zedler Medal from Wikimedia Deutschland in 2008 for his article on Ceratopsidae, a group of dinosaurs (German, English).
New version of Book tool launched
A new version of the Wikipedia Books tool (see previous story) was launched earlier this month, according to a blog post from PediaPress. The new tool launches a box at the top of the page when you click "Create a book", which then can be used to add more pages to the book by clicking the "add an article" link. Once you have a book started, you can also simply hover over an internal link to add it, via a popup interface. There is also an "add category" tool. The creator also now includes a "Suggest pages" tool, to suggest more articles for the book once you have at least one page chosen.
The tool is available to any logged-in user. More information can be found at Wikipedia:Books.
WatchKnow launched
Larry Sanger's project WatchKnow formally launched last week. WatchKnow is a nonprofit project to collect, organize and enable creation of educational videos. Although the project has been going since the summer, Sanger is planning a "grassroots" launch now.
Custom Google Search skin
As announced on the official Google blog, Google has unveiled a Wikipedia skin modification that integrates Google search features throughout the website. Instructions for applying the modification can be found at the userpage for the project: User:Csewiki.
Briefly
- Wikizine #120, covering Wikimedia news from the last two weeks, came out October 24.
- Erik Moller reported that the WMF is fully moved into their new offices.
- Ed Chi released Part 4 of his group's work on Wikipedia's growth rate (see previous stories)
- The next IRC staff office hours will take place on Thursday, October 29, featuring Kul Wadhwa, Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Business Development. [1]
Milestones
- The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 300,000 articles.
- The Breton Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
- The Crimean Tatar Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Assyrian Neo-Aramaic Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 333,333 articles (with sv:Bizerte or perhaps sv:Hodeidah).
- The Malayalam Wiktionary has reached 15,000 entries.
- The Croatian Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
- The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 2,500,000 edits.
- The Slovenian Wikipedia has reached 80,000 articles.
- The Sakha Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
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