[Wikimedia-l] Global Wikipedia: International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration
(Sorry for the cross-posting, but today is Saturday.) *Important dates:* Proposals Submission Due: January 31, 2013 Full Chapters Due: March 15, 2013 Final Submission Due: July 1, 2013 *Editors (to whom chapters should be sent and questions addressed): Pnina Fichman (fichman at indiana.edu mailto:fichman at indiana.edu); Noriko Hara (nhara at indiana.edu mailto:nhara at indiana.edu) Indiana University, Bloomington. *Introduction:* Wikipedia offers articles in 285 languages and more than 80% of Wikipedia articles are written in languages other than English. In addition, the English Wikipedia itself attracts users from all over the world. This global nature of Wikipedia provides a rich socio-technical environment to examine a wide range of international and cross-cultural issues. Despite the global reach of Wikipedia, most of the published works about Wikipedia are based on the English site. More research should pay attention to the global, multilingual nature of Wikipedia to gain a better understanding of online international cooperation, on one hand, and of cross-cultural variations in mass knowledge production processes and outcomes, on the other. The purpose of this book is to explore a wide range of international and cross-cultural issues as they are manifested on Wikipedia. We are particularly interested in research that takes a socio-technical perspective on the global Wikipedia and integrates social theory to explain online interactions. For example, we invite studies on online global collaboration, coordination, and conflict management in this rich socio-technical environment. We hope that these works will highlight implications for other socio-technical environments or extend the use and development of social theory. This unique publication aims to be a collection of international and cross-cultural research on the Wikipedia.We expect that this edited volume will appeal to academic researchers, graduate, and undergraduate students interested in Wikipedia and, more broadly, in social studies of information and communication technologies, as well as to Wikipedia contributors. *Recommended topics*: We are seeking chapters that include both empirical and conceptual work and soliciting innovative analysis of international and cross-cultural aspects of Wikipedia to be part of this book. Appropriate topics for chapters include (but are not limited to) the following list: ·Case studies of Wikipedia in one of the 285 languages, with special interest in small and medium size Wikipedias; for example, focusing on policies, processes, interactions or information quality ·Conflict and collaboration in editing international entries on any particular language of Wikipedia ·International and cross-cultural collaboration; for example, international cooperation in fighting vandalism ·Intercultural synergy across boundaries on Wikipedia or Wikimedia projects ·Cross-cultural studies that compare more than one Wikipedia, for example, focusing on: ·Cross-cultural comparisons of content, structures, and contributions ·Comparative studies of policies, interactions, and processes ·Efforts to understand similarities and differences across Wikipedia in multiple languages in user motivations, establishment and maintenance of local communities and challenges ·Comparative analysis of editing policies around the globe ·Information quality across two or more Wikipedia languages ·Comparison of scope and representation of topics across Wikipedia in several languages ·Vandalism and trolling behaviors across national and language boundaries Chapters are expected to have between 4000 and 5000 words (excluding references, figures, and tables). Only original work whose copyright is owned (or cleared) by the chapter authors and not considered for publication elsewhere can be considered for inclusion. *Important dates*: *January 31, 2013: submit 2-3 page chapter proposals and authors’ bios (200 words) *Feb 1, 2013: receive acceptance notification *March 15, 2013:*submit first full chapters *May 15, 2013: receive reviewers’ comments *July 1, 2013: submit final versions This book is scheduled to be published by Scarecrow Press. For additional information, please visit https://rowman.com/Scarecrow. Scarecrow Press is the publisher of, among other titles, /Digital Media/: /Technological and Social Challenges of the Interactive World/ (2011). The publication is anticipated to be released in 2014. ** EASA Media Anthropology Network http://www.media-anthropology.net For further information please contact: Dr. John Postill RMIT University, Melbourne jrpost...@gmail.com To manage your subscription to this mailing list, visit: http://lists.easaonline.org/listinfo.cgi/medianthro-easaonline.org -- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia ED Sue Gardner named to Global Voices Board of Directors
Fantastic! Congratulations Sue! María Enviado desde Yahoo! Mail con Android ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Disruption expected.
Posted today on the Wikimedia Tech Blog: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/19/wikimedia-sites-move-to-primary-data-center-in-ashburn-virginia/ Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia Next week, the Wikimedia Foundation will transition its main technical operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA. This is intended to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia. Engineering teams have been preparing for the migration to minimize inconvenience to our users, but major service disruption is still expected during the transition. Our sites will be in read-only mode for some time, and may be intermittently inaccessible. Users are advised to be patient during those interruptions, and share informationhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_maintenance_noticein case of continued outage or loss of functionality. The current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC (see other timezoneshttp://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikimedia+data+center+migrationiso=20130122T17ah=8on timeanddate.com). Wikimedia sites have been hosted in our main data center in Tampa, Florida, since 2004; before that, the couple of servers powering Wikipedia were in San Diego, California. Ashburn is the third and newest primary data center to host Wikimedia sites. A major reason for choosing Tampa, Florida as the location of the primary data center in 2004 was its proximity to founder Jimmy Wales’ home, at a time when he was much more involved in the technical operations of the site. In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Operations team started to lookhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/07/wmf-needs-additional-datacenter-space/for other locations with better network connectivity and more clement weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer hurricanes. The Operations team started to plan and prepare for the Virginia data center in Summer 2010. The actual build-out and racking of servers at the colocation facility started in February 2011, and was followed by a long period of hardware, system and software configuration. Traffic started to be served to users from the Ashburn data center in November 2011, in the form of CSS and JavaScript assets (served from “bits.wikimedia.org“). We reached a major milestone in February 2012, when caching servers were set up to handle read-only requests for Wikipedia and Wikimedia content, which represent most of the traffic to Wikipedia and its sister sites. In April 2012, the Ashburn data center also started to serve media files (from “upload.wikimedia.org“). Cacheable requests represent about 90 percent of our traffic, leaving 10 percent that requires interaction with our web (Apache) and database (MySQL) servers, which are still being hosted in Tampa. Until now, every edit made to a Wikipedia page has been handled by the servers in Tampa. This dependency on our Tampa data center was responsible for the site outage in August 2012https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/06/wikimedia-site-outage-6-august-2012/, when a fiber cut severed the connection between our two locations. Starting next week, the new servers in Ashburn will take on that role as well, and all our sites will be able to function fully without relying on the servers in Florida. The legacy data center in Tampa will continue to be maintained, and will serve as a secondary “hot failover” data center: servers will be in standby mode to take over, should the primary site experiences an outage. Server configuration and data will be synchronized between the two locations to ensure a transition as smooth as possible in case of technical difficulties in Ashburn. Besides just installing newer hardware, setting up the data center in Ashburn has also been an opportunity for architecture overhauls, like incremental improvements of the text storage systemhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/18/nobody-notices-when-its-not-broken-new-database-servers-deployed/, and the move to an entirely new media storage systemhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/09/scaling-media-storage-at-wikimedia-with-swift/to keep up with the growth of the content generated and curated by our contributors. Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure aims to be as open and collaborative as the sites it powers. Most of the configuration of our servershttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/19/ever-wondered-how-the-wikimedia-servers-are-configured/is publicly accessible, and the Wikimedia Labs https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/16/introduction-to-wikimedia-labs/initiative allows contributors to test and submit improvements to the sites’ configuration files. The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates a total of about 885 servers, and serves about 20 billion page views a month, on a non-profit budget that relies almost entirely
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] [PRESS RELEASE] Wikimedia Foundation named Knight News Challenge winner
Does this mean Wikinews might get an app for Android and iOS? ;-) On Jan 17, 2013 4:41 PM, Matthew Roth mr...@wikimedia.org wrote: (This press release is also available online at: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_Knight_News_Challenge_winner ) Wikimedia Foundation named winner of Knight News Challenge $600,000 in Knight Foundation funding supports innovation across Wikimedia mobile initiatives SAN FRANCISCO, CA - January 17, 2013 - The Wikimedia Foundation was named a winner in the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge for its efforts to expand and improve Wikimedia's mobile projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is enhancing the Wikipedia mobile experience and making it easier to access Wikipedia, particularly for readers in developing countries. As mobile technology is increasingly the primary opportunity for billions of people around the world to access the Internet, the Wikimedia Foundation is working to remove the two biggest hurdles to access free knowledge: cost and accessibility. The News Challenge grant will be utilized in four areas: *Improving the way that users experience our mobile platform on feature phones; *Expanding Wikipedia Zero, which gives mobile users free access to Wikipedia on their phones; *Developing features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is, including new ways to access Wikipedia via texting; *Increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile. The Wikimedia Foundation is one of eight mobile projects to receive a total of $2.4 million today through the Knight News Challenge, which accelerates projects with funding and advice from Knight's network of media innovators. A full list is at knightfoundation.org. Knight Foundation's funding will support us making the mobile version of Wikipedia easier to use, as well as enabling us to expand Wikipedia Zero, our project with mobile operators that lets their customers access Wikipedia for free, said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm very happy Knight has chosen to support us; it's an important affirmation of our mobile work. Knight Foundation, the nation’s leading funder of journalism and media innovation, is committed to promoting democracy by supporting informed and engaged communities. Founded by newsmen John S. and James L. Knight, the foundation launched the Knight News Challenge in 2007 to find the next generation of innovations that help communities get the information they need. Wikipedia has helped define the way that people collaboratively create content. Making the site available to more people across the world will help foster and spread that culture, said John Bracken, director for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation. The $600,000 News Challenge grant is for two years and follows a general support grant of $250,000 that Knight Foundation awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation in December 2012. The Wikimedia Foundation and the other winners of the challenge will present their projects via live Web stream at 12:30 p.m. ET/ 10:30 a.m. MT Friday, January 18 at knightfoundation.org/live, from a gathering on the future of mobile at Arizona State University. (Follow #newschallenge on Twitter.) About the Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org http://blog.wikimedia.org The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 483 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most popular web property world-wide (comScore, November 2012). Available in 285 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 24 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of roughly 80,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants. Press contact Jay Walsh Senior Director, Communications Wikimedia Foundation Tel. +1 415-860-8166 jwa...@wikimedia.org About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org or newschallenge.org Press contact Andrew Sherry VP for Communications, Knight Foundation Tel. 305-908-2677 she...@knightfoundation.org (To unsubscribe from Wikimedia Foundation press releases, reply with unsubscribe in the subject line.) ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing
[Wikimedia-l] 2013 Stewards Election - candidate submission closes in a week
Dear all, I'd like to inform everyone that Steward Election 2013 [1] has now begun. Self-nominations from eligible candidates is open since 15 January. Interested candidates can check their eligibility and procedure to submit the nomination on the guidelines page [2]. We are open to accept candidate submissions till January 28, 2013, 23:59 (UTC). Questions to the candidates can also be posted. Confirmation of existing stewards [3] is scheduled to run concurrently with the election. Please remember, the voting and confirmation discussion have not yet begun and will be not until February 8, 2013, 00:00 (UTC). Voters eligibility is outlined at the guideline page as well. For those who want to help us out with translation, please see our translation portal [4]. Your contribution is really appreciated. If you have any questions or comments about the election and confirmation, feel free to post on the talk page, or the IRC channel #wikimedia-stewards-elections. Lastly, do feel free to forward this email and inform your local community. There is only slightly more than 1 week before candidate submission closes. [1] Election main page: - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/Elections_2013 [2] Guidelines and information: - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/Elections_2013/Guidelines [3] Confirmation: - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/confirm/2013 [4] Translation portal: - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/Elections_2013/Translation Regards, Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]] Regards, Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]] ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
