Wikimedia Highlights, November 2015

Wikipedia Town and Wikipedia ARTS in Kyoto

Wikipedia Town Kyoto. Photo by Kumiko Korezumi, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The concept of Wikipedia Towns is spreading across Japan—first in Yokohama in February 2013, then in Ina, Mori and Kyoto. Wikipedia Town helps people find local information and edit Wikipedia articles—and those are the people who used to be merely readers of Wikipedia.

In April, Kyoto Prefectural Library hosted a new event called Wikipedia ARTS. During Parasophia 2015, or Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, participants enjoyed modern arts exhibited at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, and walked across the street to Kyoto Prefectural Library where they edited the Wikipedia articles on the artists they found in the exhibition.

Bengali Wikipedia: the largest Bengali content website on the Internet

Bangla Wikipedians in a Photo-walk at Dhaka, Bangladesh (2010). Photograph by Bellayet, Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

With about 250 million native and about 300 million total speakers worldwide, Bangla is the seventh most spoken language in the world by total number of native speakers and the eleventh most spoken language by total number of speakers. It is the only language in the world which is achieved by a language movement; people sacrificed their lives for the right to read, write, and speak the language Bangla. Building an encyclopedia in this language was unavoidable.

Bangla Wikipedia started its journey in January 2004. Back then, the people of Bangladesh had a little interest in Wikipedia. A few students and scholars used the English Wikipedia, but it was not accountable.The whole scenario changed in 2006. During that time, the Bangla blogging world was growing slowly, and many people became accustomed to Bangla computing—thanks in part to a free and open-source Bangla typing tool, Avro. On March 25, 2006, a Wiki team was created by the Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN) to popularize Wikipedia through out the country. The aim was to represent the country to the world through Wikipedia and build a complete encyclopedia in Bangla. Between 2009 and 2010, Bangla speakers from West Bengal, India also started to contribute to Bangla Wikipedia. In the meantime, the Wikimedia Foundation started their operations and in October 2011 a 'local chapter was approved in Bangladesh by the Foundation to promote educational content in Bangla.

Now, Bangla Wikipedia has more than 38,000 articles on various topics with over 500 active editors per month. People from around the country now regularly arrange workshops and meet-up with active Wikipedians to participate on the Bangla Wikipedia.

Ukrainian Wikipedia reaches 600,000 articles

Methylene blue, one of many redox indicators. Photo by Amanda Slater, freely licensed under CC by-SA 2.0.]]

After twelve years, the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia has passed another milestone—600,000 articles. The article reaching the milestone was Окисно-відновні індикатори (Redox indicators), substances that are used in chemistry to determine the equivalence point of an redox reaction.

The articles for previous hundred-thousand milestones are Гойтосир (Goitosyros), Список країн за видобутком вугілля (List of countries by coal production), Шумейко-Роман Олена Олександрівна (Olena Shumeiko-Roman), Міяма (Miyama, Fukuoka), Електронний газ (Free electron model). The last five-hundredth one was created on May 12, 2014.

The post was originally published in the Wikimedia Ukraine blog.

Wikimedia’s Funds Dissemination Committee—how to fairly distribute money around the world

The FDC and supporting WMF staff. Photo by MGuss (WMF), freely licensed under CC0 1.0.

Check out these new features and extensions kicked off at Google Summer of Code 2015

Image from the UK Ministry of Defence, freely licensed under OGL 1.0.

Google Summer of Code and Outreachy are two software development internship programs that Wikimedia participates in every year. For the last nine years, college students have applied to be a part of the coding summer, one of many outreach programs operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

For the first time, all Wikimedia projects that passed the evaluation were immediately deployed in production or Wikimedia Labs. Here they are:

• TranslateWiki is a popular translation platform used by many projects across Wikimedia and several times as many outside it. Developed single-handedly once by Niklas Laxström, the platform has expanded significantly since its launch in 2006. This project aims to add a Search feature to the Translate extension. Dibya Singh was the project intern.
• Crosswatch is a cross-wiki watchlist for all Wikimedia wikis. The goal of the project is to help editors who are active in several wikis to monitor changes and generally to provide a better watchlist for all editors. The project was completed by Jan Lebert.
• Wikivoyage is a wiki about travel and holds rich details related to visiting places. This wiki has a special preference for showing page wide banners at the top of each of their articles to enhance their aesthetic appeal. An example of such a banner can be seen here. The project is all about addressing these issues and adding capabilities through a Mediawiki extension to take the banner experience to the next level. You can test it out here. Summit Asthana was the project intern.
• LanguageTool is an extension for VisualEditor that enables language proofing support in about twenty languages. Ankita Kumari completed the project.
• Newsletter Extension for MediaWiki offers a catalog with all the newsletters available in a wiki farm, and the possibility to subscribe/unsubscribe and receive notifications without having to visit or be an active editor of any wiki. Tina Johnson was the intern for this project.
• This was a project to add support for <?> Flow, MediaWiki’s new discussion framework, to [<tvar|g12>https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot Pywikibot], a Python framework widely used for bots operating on Wikimedia wikis. This project was completed by Alexander Jones.
• MediaWiki supports OAuth v1.0a as a method of authentication via OAuth extension. This project adds OAuth v1.0a support for Pywikibot. The project was completed by Jiarong Wei.
• SmiteSpam is a MediaWiki extension that helps wiki administrators identify and delete spam pages. Vivek Ghaisas completed the project.
• ve-graph is a module within the Graph extension that aims to bring graph editing tools to VisualEditor in order to bridge the gap between editors and Vega, the visualization engine powering graphs in MediaWiki pages. Frédéric Bolduc completed the project.