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.
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Hover over the image for attribution, or click the image for full details.
See also my post on the previous year’s contest.
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.
Perhaps you know these 20 things, but the press is very confused. In response to the ongoing cluelessness of reporters, Andrew Lih has revamped Wikipedia’s Press Kit and Erik Möller has created a page with “10 Things You Did Not Know About Wikipedia“.
Together, they give these 20 commonly confused points:
How many of those did you already know?
See the press kit and 10 things page for explanations of these.
Wikimedia Advisory Board member Danny Hillis launched Freebase this week, a startup that TechCrunch says is aiming to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“.
Like Wikipedia, Freebase will allow participants to add to and edit at least some of the content. Content is also brought in from other sites, including Wikipedia. User contributed content will be freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
Tim O’Reilly, coiner of the term “web 2.0“, calls Freebase “the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web.”
Freebase is a project of Metaweb which used to host Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver Wiki (see archive.org for April’s version). Wikipedia noted the wiki’s disappearance in January.
See Wikipedia’s article on Freebase for more information. See also Wikimedia’s meta page on the related Semantic MediaWiki.
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Volunteer Coordinator. This role will be one of only eleven paid positions within the Foundation, the non-profit parent organization of Wikipedia.
The announcement says that “if you’ve devoted much of your life to the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects, and you enjoy interacting with our international community, this is an opportunity for you to turn your hobby into a profession”.
The role is about coordinating the Wikimedia committees, rather than the people voluntarily editing the projects.
See the job openings page for details.
The final stage of the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2006 began today. The top eleven images (shown below) can now be voted on by Wikimedians and the winner will be selected at the end of the month. Click the image below to view larger versions of the images with captions and author details or visit the Wikimedia Commons to see the original photos and to take part in the selection of the Picture of the Year.
Update: March 2: The winner was The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, shining above Bear Lake, Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, by Senior Airman Joshua Strang.
It’s a shame the winner wasn’t a Wikimedian. My favorite was Wollex’s unique photo of the wreck of the American Star which finished in sixth place.
Today, January 15th, is Wikipedia’s sixth birthday, and also the final day of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Fundraising Drive.
So far, the total raised is $980,903. Less than $20,000 to go to make a million dollars.
If you haven’t donated yet, give Wikipedia a birthday present and contribute towards its reliability and sustainability.
I’m not sure I want 2006 to end. It’s been a great year.
Here’s what happened:
I spent New Year with my family in England after spending my first Christmas away, with Tim in NSW. At the start of January, I visited Florida for the first time and spent a couple of weeks at the office Wikia and Wikimedia were sharing in St. Petersburg. This was when Wikia got its first round of investment. The news was leaked in February and announced in March (blog post). Tim and Kate temporarily joined Wikia’s technical team.
The $4m from Wikia’s first investment round allowed me to hire the first two Wikia Community Team members, sannse and Mindspillage, in February.
In March, I visited Austria for the Content for Competitiveness conference in Vienna. Back in Australia, I visited Perth for the first time and met Mark Ryan from Wikipedia and Tim’s sister. Wikicities rebranded as “Wikia” and finally announced the first round of investment.
I made another trip to the US in April for the very interesting Forum on Digital Transition in Santa Barbara. That was followed by the smallest Wikipedia meetup I’ve been to since only one other person (Antandrus) showed up! I was back in Australia for Easter and Tim’s birthday. KaurJmeb joined Wikia’s community team and John Q Smith joined Wikia’s technical team to lead ops, support, and development.
Tim visited England for the first in May. We stopped off for a two day trip to Hong Kong on the way. 
My first nephew, Alex, was born in May whilst I was in England. The book I part-authored, Wikis: Tools for Information Work And Collaboration, was published in May. Back in Australia, we attempted to find a new place to live but never got round to moving. Emil Podlaszewski, Wikia’s new head of product development in Poland, was introduced to Wikia but didn’t actually start until later in the year. The Polish team has been expanding every month since.
I attended the iX conference in Singapore and appeared on TV for the first time, doing three televised interviews about Wikipedia whilst I was in Asia. Gil Penchina officially became Wikia’s CEO this month and Rieke and Solensean joined Wikia’s community team. I resigned from the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation after a bad decision by the rest of the Board. WikiZine made my resignation public in July and it took effect in September when Erik Möller was elected to replace me.
I went to the Brisbane for the first time for the Students of Sustainability conference. Splarka joined Wikia’s community team as an intern. Bill Kaufman joined Wikia as head of verticals. Wikia had a lot of press regarding Jimmy’s launch of the Campaigns Wikia.
My third trip to the US this year was for Wikimania (blog post), Wikimedia’s second annual conference, which was held at Harvard. Tim and I stopped in New York for a few days before it and I rushed back after it for the X|Media|Lab event in Melbourne - it was last year’s event in November which led to me staying in Australia so it was great to be there again. I fitted in a second trip to Brisbane this month, for an Open Innovation Round Table discussion. Next in August, I made a very long trip to Denmark for WikiSym where I gave a keynote on how and why Wikipedia works. Then it was back to Melbourne to talk about Future Directions for Free Content at the Churchill Club (blog post). Mindspillage and Solensean left Wikia this month and Splarka joined as a permanent staff member.
Juan David joined Wikia’s community team. Tim was ill for most of September and needed surgery so it was an otherwise quiet month.
I made few plans for the rest of the year since Tim and I weren’t sure when we’d be going to England, but events nearby kept me busy. I visited Brisbane for the third time, this time to talk about Copyright Challenges and User Generated Technologies. I went to Canberra the next day to take part in the Digital Culture series of talks at the National Library of Australia and then attended James Dellow’s Rebooting the Enterprise talk before returning to Melbourne.
We’d hoped to leave for England before November but it was too soon after Tim’s operation for him to fly so far, though we did fly to NSW for Tim’s mother’s birthday. The English Wikipedia reached 1.5 million articles.
Wikia’s first big announcement this month was the acquisition of ArmchairGM. Robert Lefkowitz, Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis and David Pean joined Wikia as part of the acquititsion and began work on OpenServing (blog post). Wikia announced its second round of investment - all of it from Amazon - on December 8th (blog post). We had two big hits in the press shortly after this - firstly with OpenServing which is still in testing, and will be more widely available very soon, and secondly with “Wikiasari“, which didn’t really exist before the press made it up, but may well exist at some point next year. 
I started WikiChix, a new community for women involved with wikis, in response to concerns that women were not comfortable posting to Wikipedia’s mailing lists. Anthere invited me to chair Wikimedia’s new Advisory Board. After attending the fun Stirr Sydney event, I packed up and left Australia, at least temporarily. We spent a day and a half in London before going to see my parents. Tim spent his first Christmas away from home, with my family, and we’ll be spending new year’s at my sister’s.
My New Year’s resolution is to make no plans. I don’t know if or when I’ll be back in Australia and I have no idea where Wikia will be in a year from now. I wouldn’t have predicted a year ago that we’d now have 40 staff, two rounds of investment, 60000 registered users, and more than 400000 articles, so I’m not attempting to predict next year. I just hope it’s as amazing as this year was.
Happy New Year!
You can give the gift of knowledge by donating to the Wikimedia Foundation!
If you were thinking of donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, then today is a good day to do that since your donation with be matched by Virgin Unite, the charitable arm of the Virgin Group. See “Wikimedia thanks Virgin Unite“.
This is the Foundation’s first fundraising drive since January this year. Unregistered users have been shown a permanent link calling for donations since then, which has decreased the need for quarterly fundraising drives. This drive is focused on the reliability of Wikimedia’s content and the long-term sustainability of every Wikimedia project.
You may have to read about Virgin Unite on Wikipedia since unfortunately their site went down within 12 minutes of being linked from Wikimedia’s site notices (these appear at the top of every page of every Wikimedia project - see “Slashdot effect“). If the site stays up, you can also donate to Virgin Unite’s projects.
This is the first time any organization has been allowed a logo in Wikipedia’s site notice. The thanks to Yahoo for the servers in April 2005 included a controversial link (but no logo) to Jimmy’s post on the Yahoo Search Blog and wasn’t attempted again until now. Wikimedia’s FAQ on matching donations is hoped to allay the concerns people might have about whether this constitutes advertising, with the official view being that it does not.
Florence Devouard, Wikimedia’s new chair, announced today the appointment of three new members of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen will join immediately and Jan-Bart de Vreede will replace Tim Shell later this month.
Kat was one of Wikia’s first community staff members. Jan-Bart works for the Kennisnet Foundation which both provides hosting for Wikimedia and pays for hosting from Wikia (Kennisnet is in fact Wikia’s only paying customer). Kat and Oscar were the runners up in the 2006 Board elections which were held to find a replacement for me after I resigned.
In the related Board resolution, the board reaffirmed its commitment to expand further in the coming years. The resolution also says that Tim Shell will resign on December 15, that the terms of Jimmy Wales and Michael Davis will expire in December 2007, and that Florence’s term will be extended by a year.
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| I was a guest on Episode 41 of Wikipedia Weekly. You can listen here. |
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