Hi -- or better: Heya! -- Lydia:
Congratulations to your new role! This is great news for the project,
which allows Wikidata to proceed on its important mission in perfect
continuity. Denny has made huge contributions to the project in the past
1.5 years -- a task that often involved balancing many forces, both on a
technical and on a social level. Without his commitment and energy, we
would not be in this encouraging position today. We would also have a
lot less funding to draw from.
We are really extremely fortunate to continue with a product manager who
is perfectly prepared for this important role: someone who has the key
skills as well as the specific experience, and who has a profound
understanding of what open source and open knowledge are all about.
So welcome again in your new job, and all the best for the next steps.
Cheers,
Markus
On 01/10/13 15:30, Lydia Pintscher wrote:
(crossposting from http://blog.wikimedia.de/?p=17250)
In early 2010 I met Denny and Markus for the first time in a small
room at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to talk about Semantic
MediaWiki, its development and its community. I was intrigued by the
idea they'd been pushing for since 2005 - bringing structured data to
Wikipedia. So when the time came to assemble the team for the
development of Wikidata and Denny approached me to do community
communications for it there was no way I could have said no. The
project sounded amazing and the timing was perfect since I was about
to finish my studies of computer science. In the one and a half years
since then we have achieved something amazing. We've built a great
technical base for Wikidata and much more importantly we've built an
amazing community around it. We've built the foundation for something
extraordinary. On a personal level I could never have dreamed where
this one meeting in a small room in Karlsruhe has taken me now.
From now on I will be taking over product ownership of Wikidata as its
product manager.
Up until today we've built the foundation for something extraordinary.
But at the same time there are still a lot of things that need to be
worked on by all of us together. The areas that we need to focus on
now are:
* Building trust in our data. The project is still young and the
Wikipedia editors and others are still wary of using data from
Wikidata on a large scale. We need to build tools and processes to
make our data more trustworthy.
* Improving the user experience around Wikidata. Building Wikidata to
the point where it is today was a tremendous technical task that we
achieved in a rather short time. This though meant that in places the
user experience has not gotten as much attention. We need to make the
experience of using Wikidata smoother.
* Making Wikidata easier to understand. Wikidata is a very geeky and
technical project. However to be truly successful it will need to be
easy to get the ideas behind it.
These are crucial for Wikidata to have the impact we all want it to
have. And we will all need to work on those - both in the development
team and in the rest of the Wikidata community.
Let's make Wikidata a joy to use and get it used in places and ways we
can't even imagine yet.
Cheers
Lydia
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