Now that I have a personal blog as well as this one, I wondered about moving my “end of year” post there, but now it’s the 3rd, it seems traditional to have it here too, so I’m cross-posting. For previous years, see end of 2006 and end of 2007.
January
Tim and I started the year at Woodford festival, camping in a rented non-waterproof tent in the rain!
February
For Valentines day, we had dinner at Green Palace, a vegetarian Thai restaurant in Newtown.
On the 18th, my grandad died at the age of 88 years.
March
I had planned to be at Wikia’s offices in San Mateo for two weeks in March. Pop’s funeral was scheduled the same time. So, after a week in California, I did a day trip to England and got back to the US on Tuesday for the rest of the week’s meetings.
Back in Sydney, Tim proposed to me on the 22nd, the day before Easter.
April
Tim and I were back in England at the start of April as I’d been invited to give a keynote at the JISC conference in Birmingham. I also gave a short talk at The Webby 5 & People’s Voice Voting party in London and we celebrated our engagement with family and friends in England.
We went back to Australia for Tim’s family reunion in Bellingen.
May
We chose our wedding cake this month. After withdrawing my previous visa application for “de-facto spouse”, I started health checks for a new application for a “prospective marriage” visa.
June
In June, Tim and I flew off in different directions. I spent a few days in Korea for the International Conference on Information Culture, and Tim went to San Francisco for a staff meeting.
Back in Australia, we had our 2nd engagement party - this time a barbecue with Tim’s family.
I also bought my wedding dress this month.
July
In July we went to Egypt for Wikimedia’s annual conference, Wikimania. We spent a few days as tourists in Cairo before getting a bus to Alexandria for the conference. Unfortunately I contracted what was probably E. coli from a dodgy salad at the Novotel at Cairo airport and spend most of the time in Alexandria extremely ill. We headed home via Abu Dhabi where we stopped for one night.
August
For the past few years, my birthday has been during Wikimania, but as that was early this year, I was able to properly celebrate and we has dinner at Rise, a Japanese restaurant in Sydney.
September
In September, we headed to New Zealand for a few days so that my visa could be granted (which had to happen out of the country). We flew into Christchurch because it was by far the cheapest flight from Sydney, and then went to the embassy in Auckland where my visa was approved.
Back in Australia we attended Tim’s 10 year school reunion.
October
Just a month to go before the wedding, but instead of working on that, Tim and I went to San Francisco. It was the first time we’d been there together! I spent the week at Wikia’s new office in San Francisco and Tim was just around the corner for more Wikimedia staff meetings.
November
We got back to Sydney just in time for Wiki Wednesday which I spoke at. A few days later my family arrived in Australia for the first time. We managed to fit in some touristy thing alongside making last minute plans for the wedding on the 23rd.
And finally a chance to relax! We had a wonderful honeymoon on Hamilton Island, part of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Cruising, sailing, snorkelling, great food, and lots of relaxing!
December
Of course I made up for it in December by spending a busy month catching up before celebrating Christmas with Tim’s family in Bilgola.
My plans for next year include speaking at Linux Conference in Tasmania, attending Wikimania in Buenos Aires, making the final transition to Australia (my parents are still looking after all my junk and receiving lots of post for me!), buying a house, and doing all I can to make Wikia profitable for the first time!
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Launched on Wikia this week is a new wiki to provide a 3rd party versioning system for Obama’s transition site, change.gov. The site was created by Silona Bonewald and Brian Gannon of the League of Technical Voters in response to many suggestions that this needed to happen, especially since it was noticed that part of the policy section of the site had disappeared without explanation.
One of the many benefits of the decision to release change.gov under a free license is that it doesn’t matter that the site itself is not yet version controlled since anyone can reuse that content to provide an independent versioning system. Having a third party do the versioning is more trustworthy than versioning on the site itself as it’s so easy, with MediaWiki at least, to secretly remove revisions (a feature known as “oversight” on Wikipedia) and to secretly add revisions. Whilst it would be great if they would use a wiki for the site, that alone would not provide enough transparency to prevent unwanted sections disappearing again.
You can get involved by visiting the wiki at change.wikia.com or by subscribing to the mailing list.
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I’m pleased to announce that my husband now has a blog. After years of telling Tim he ought to have one, he finally decided that our new VPS should probably be used for more than my own 2 blogs and 3 wikis! Please visit tstarling.com for his first post, on secure web uploads. He’ll be writing about his work for Wikimedia and about web software development in general.
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It was nice to see “wiki” as the 5th fastest rising search term here in Australia in Google’s 2008 zeitgeist which was published this week.
Wiki was also amongst the top 10 rising search terms in The Netherlands (5th), New Zealand (5th), Switzerland (6th), Italy (8th), Sweden (8th), Finland (9th), and Singapore (9th). The home page lists wiki as the 10th fastest rising for the UK as well, but the world page does not.
The only place where Wiki was within the top 10 most popular, rather than fastest rising, was Singapore. However, Wikipedia appears on the most popular list for a few countries, including Switzerland (4th), Austria (6th), Hong Kong (6th), Finland (7th), and Germany (7th).
For Russia, википедия (meaning Wikipedia) was the 3rd fastest rising. I didn’t recognise any other translations of wiki or Wikipedia on the lists (although I’m a bit surprised I would recognise википедия!)
In theory, it would be possible to extract similar data for Wikia Search. The metrics section contains info on the number of times each term was searched for and the trends section lets you compare multiple terms. Like the rest of Wikia Search, this data is available under a free license, making it possible for anyone to reuse the data to create their own zeitgeist. For example, the graph below shows the number of daily searches for the word “wiki” on Wikia Search.
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Sorry - I couldn’t resist the title. Those were the 4 most popular queries made at Wikia Search at the time of our pre-alpha launch in January.
Wikia Search relaunched today (see the press release). Our search team have made some amazing improvements since January. Not only does it “suck less” but it’s actually fun. Which isn’t something I usually find with search engines!
It’s unrecogniazble from the versions early in the year so do check it out again. And try clicking the header on any search results page for something unexpected…
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Tim proposed to me on Saturday night in a romantic setting outside the Sydney Opera House overlooking the Harbour Bridge.
We’re planning to get married in NSW this year, around the time of our three year anniversary.
Here’s a picture of the ring. It’s white gold with three Moissanite stones. I wanted an alternative to diamonds to avoid mining, cartels, conflicts, and marketing. Photographed sitting on the red roses Tim bought me.
And the picture below shows the location of the proposal. (Photo by Diliff, cc-by-sa)
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I love the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest. The 2007 results were recently announced. I voted for Henri Camus’ storm at Pors-Loubous.
Here are top 22 images. The width is proportional to the number of votes each received.
Hover over the image for attribution, or click the image for full details.
See also my post on the previous year’s contest.
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Thinking of writing a blog post about the Wikimedia Commons picture of the year contest reminded me I had an unpublished draft post about 2007. Like my end of 2006 post, here’s a summary of what happened last year.
January
I celebrated New Year at my sister’s house in England, with my family and Tim.
Essjay joined Wikia’s community team on January 7th. Tim and I went to a London Wikipedia meetup on the 9th.
February
I went to San Mateo for the first Wikia staff meeting in the new office. It was my first time in San Francisco. The number of people there was amazing - 36 compared to 6 the previous February. Of everything that happened there, the thing that sticks most in my mind is the “party bus” - something I just can’t sum up on my blog. Quite incredible. Drunk staff, getting more drunk while on a bus that has a disco ball. Cigars on the no-smoking bus, people climbing out of the sunroof, wheelchairs, weird people in the bar, falling off a giant chair… and there’s another one of these coming up in March!
I got back to England and took Tim to Birmingham for valentine’s day. Perhaps not the most romantic city in the world, but I have fond memories of it since I went to uni there.
Wikia was listed as one of CNN’s 25 startups to watch.
A cute article in The Age mentions that Tim and I met through Wikipedia.
March
Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.
The Times had an interview with me, claiming my “world has certainly been changed by Wikipedia.” Very true. I also spoke on a radio station in Melbourne on TV in a BBC World interview later in month. A lot of the press was sadly about Essjay, who resigned from Wikia on March 4th.
Datrio, then a board member of Wikimedia Poland, moved from Wikia’s tech staff to community staff, and provided a vital connection between the two. Catherine Munro, who joined Wikipedia a week before I did, joined Wikia on March 15th, at least in part to replace Essjay.
April
In April, I took part in a panel at the British Association for American Studies conference in Leicester.
I attended a Wiki Wednesday and spoke at a Girl Geek dinner in London.
May
I went to Canada for the first time in May for the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal, en route to New York for Wikia’s product summit.
Shun Fukuzawa joined Wikia’s as our first representative in Japan. Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joined Wikia to work on Wikia Search.
June
In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.
July
I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.
August
I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.
September
A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.
I saw wild kangaroos for the first time. There were around 100 of them in the Morisset Hospital grounds!
I spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney and attended Webjam.
October
In October, Tim went to Florida and I went to Melbourne. I spoke at a Digital Culture Forum at ACMI.
I packed up our old flat in Melbourne so we could finally move to Sydney; something we’d been planning to do since July 2006. We moved to Hornsby Heights. There are fast trains from Hornsby into the center of Sydney, and it’s far enough out of the city that we can afford to rent a two-bedroom house rather than a flat. There is an amazing variety of wildlife here as you can see from the photos on my wiki.
November
Back in Sydney, I spoke at the International Association of Business Communicators.
I’ve not blogged much this year, but my wiki is slightly more active. In November, I added the ‘Wikis you can’t edit‘ page (it’s not what you think) and started to collect photos of things I see in the yard. So far the page includes wallabies, snakes, spiders, kookaburras, parrots, cuckoos, skinks, blue-tongued lizards, peahens, cockatoos, leeches, crickets, and other insects. They’re not great photos but an interesting reminder of what I’ve seen since moving to Sydney.
December
I spoke at the Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World in Sydney.
Tim and I flew to Queensland to spend Christmas with his family. It’s the first time I’ve been away without my laptop. I had to amuse myself by watching the carpet python on the rafters outside instead!
After Christmas, we went to the Woodford Folk Festival. It rained constantly and was extremely muddy. In the 20 minutes the sun came out, I managed to get sunburnt and bitten by a green ant. Despite that, it was very enjoyable, and a much needed break, since it was the first time since Wikia started that I’ve actually taken an entire week off!
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It’s 2 years today since I first arrived in Australia. I was here for the X|Media|Lab conference in Melbourne and I thought it might be the only time in my life I would visit Australia, so I decided to take a few days off and visit Sydney while I was here.
This was before Wikia had its first round of investment, and more than a year since I’d last had a job that paid a proper salary, so I stayed in the cheapest hostel I could find in the not-so delightful area of King’s Cross. The next day, I met the Sydney Wikipedians for what is still my best ever Wikipedia meetup. They took me on a great tour of the city, seeing the Town Hall, the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge.
Two years later, I’m still here! So much for it being my only visit. I’ve now arrived in Australia 10 times and I’m living in Sydney. I came back to Australia a couple of weeks after the conference and moved in with Tim Starling. We’re now renting a house in Hornsby Heights with beautiful bushland views and wallabies in our garden.
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What do the Wikia sites on events, POV editorials, photography, the Polish RPG Wolsung, and the Fallout series of games have in common?
Add a guess in the comments.
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