Wikimedia Highlights, December 2014/ta

The Wikimedia Foundation's first-ever year-in-review video chronicles the celebration, pain, fear, resilience, and discovery that came to characterize 2014. While watching the video, you embark on a journey through the world and Wikipedia, revisiting what you read and edited this year. From the FIFA World Cup to the Indian general elections, and the Ice Bucket Challenge to Ebola in West Africa, we follow threads of discovery through Wikipedia in various languages, finding opportunities to contribute along the way. Watch the video, which takes you from Sochi to outer space in less than three minutes.

Many community members think that 'being nice to each other' can help improve Wikipedia.
'How can we improve Wikipedia?' photo by Fabrice Florin, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Can we improve Wikipedia by being nicer to each other? In this personal view, Fabrice Florin shares ideas for growing a "culture of kindness" on Wikipedia. Over the past few years, he collected hundreds of community suggestions for improving Wikipedia -- inviting contributors to write down their idea on a notepad, and get their photo taken. Some of the most frequent responses invite contributors to be more civil: "Be nice," "Be kind," "Be friendly." Participants often observe that participating on Wikipedia can be a frustrating experience for new and experienced users alike, because many of our members lack civility. Ideas for building more trust in our communities include: help newbies, train editors, reward kindness, build more social tools, use friendlier channels and give everyone a voice. Read more and watch the video here.

Last fall, the Wikipedia Library announced another round of digital resource access partnerships. These partnerships allow experienced editors from all around the globe to access research materials behind a paywall, to advance our goal of creating and sharing a summary of all human knowledge. One of the longest lasting and most useful donation partnerships has been with journal archive JSTOR. It saw significant participation from non-English editors, speaking languages like German, Spanish, French -- and Persian, which came as a pleasant surprise. To learn more, we asked one of our most active Persian editors with a JSTOR account, User:4nn1l2, why he finds the Wikipedia Library important to his work.

Wikipedia has made huge progress towards its mission to provide free access to the sum of human knowledge. But indigenous knowledge is largely excluded because the majority of it is not available in writing. To address this issue, community volunteer Peter Gallert designed a workshop for the 2014 Participatory Design conference in Namibia, to produce and document examples of relevant oral citations. Last October, a small group of Wikipedians traveled to the Namibian village of Otjinene to interview elders about traditions, culture and development of the local Herero community. The aim of the interview was to directly convert narratives into Wikipedia content with oral citations.

This selection includes the top 5 stories published on the Wikimedia Blog in December 2014 (based on total page views up to Jan. 30, 2015) -- as well as other noteworthy stories contributed by community members that month.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting on January 15, 2015, focusing on the topic of quality (slides)

ஃபேப்ரிஸ் ஃப்ளோரின்(WMF), நகர்வுத் தகவல் தொடர்பு மேலாளர், விக்கிமீடியா நிறுவனம்

டில்மன் பேயர் (WMF), முதுநிலை பகுப்பாய்வர், விக்கிமீடியா நிறுவனம்