Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/News and notes



Foundation's Community Department searching for "storyteller" and summer research fellows
A job opening for a "storyteller" was posted to the Wikimedia Foundation's web site last week, defining the new position as follows: "The movement storyteller will work with members of Wikimedia communities to teach Wikimedia readers about the world behind the content they rely on everyday." Replying to comments on the Foundation-l mailing list, Chief Community Officer Zack Exley clarified that "there is one important purpose of that job that may be a bit hidden in between the lines: For this position, I'm looking for someone who can help free us from dependence on 'The Jimmy Letter' in fundraising", by making the donation appeal letters from other community members more effective. (On the other hand, their banners – the first step in leading a reader to making a donation, with the letter being the second – already "got similar, sometimes slightly better, click rates as the Jimmy banners". Exley said that a detailed analysis of the fundraiser is in the making.)

A new page about Wikimedia Fellowships has been set up on Meta, reflecting recent clarifications (Signpost coverage) about the program, which was started last year and "offers the chance for volunteers from the projects, academics, and industry professionals to work with the Wikimedia Foundation in a new way."

On the official Wikimedia blog, the "first Virtual Community History Fellowship" program was announced, which during the summer will pair graduate students with community members from Wikimedia projects to write historical accounts of these projects (at the moment, focus is on the Tagalog, Italian, Armenian, Belarusian, Polish, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Cantonese and Chinese Wikipedias).

Two other summer fellowships for quantitative and qualitative research do not appear to have been posted by the WMF in a public venue, but were revealed last week (the deadline was March 7th) on the Wiki-research mailing list by an independent academic who called them "well-paid". One of them was to gather a small team of PhD graduate students from disciplines "involving large scale data analysis", for work on "developing a community analytics platform to gain a better understanding of [the Wikimedia Foundation's] contributors and readers." The qualitative research internships were offered to "PhD candidates or people who have completed Masters degrees in history, other humanities fields, anthropology and other social sciences", whose task will be "to understand better why the active editor base is not replenishing itself at the same rate it used to – and to present data that can help our communities figure out what to do about it".

In other news, the contracts of Community Associates Christine Moellenberndt and James Alexander  have been extended.

New edition of GLAM newsletter
The second edition of This Month in GLAM, a newsletter on Wikimedia collaborations with cultural institutions, has been published on the Wikimedia Foundation's Outreach wiki. Among various other items covered previously in the Signpost, it records the following events for February:
 * The Museum for Hamburg History have begun a collaboration with Wikipedia and will be donating some 200 images of a house restoration.
 * Derby Museum and Art Gallery have begun using QR codes in their exhibits, which link to the relevant article on the English Wikipedia.

Briefly

 * New English Wikipedia offline release: Version 0.8, the latest collection designed for offline release, is now available for download. It contains around 47,300 articles taken from all subject areas in the English Wikipedia, with selection based on importance and quality.  It is being used by the Version 1.0 team to test out automated revisionID selection, with software based on WikiTrust.  Free downloads of Version 0.8 are available in the form of raw ZIM files, or bundled with Kiwix or Okawix readers (PC/Mac/Linux).  A BitTorrent release is also under way, with iPhone/iPad and Android variants made available later this month.
 * GLAM-WIKI videos: Video recordings of keynote presentations at the GLAM-WIKI conference held in London in November (Signpost coverage: "British Museum hosts two days of talks between Wikimedia and the cultural sector") have been uploaded to the Internet Archive (links). (Audio recordings with better sound quality have already been available.)
 * Is Quora the next Wikipedia?: On his "The Wikipedian" blog, User:WWB tried to answer the question "Is Quora [ a question-and-answer site that has gained prominence in recent months] the Next Wikipedia?" in four postings ("Part I" "Part II: Follow the Leader", "Part III: It’s the Little Differences", "Part IV: If Personnel is Policy, then Userbase is Destiny"). Last month, researcher Seb Paquet had explained "Why Quora is Not Wikipedia" (Signpost coverage).

