Since September 2022, it is possible to create geopoints using a QID. Many wiki contributors have asked for this feature, but it is not being used much. Therefore, we would like to remind you about it. More information can be found on the project page. If you have any comments, please let us know on the talk page. – Best regards, the team of Technical Wishes at Wikimedia Deutschland
The Technical Wishes team at Wikimedia Deutschland is planning to make reusing references easier. For our research, we are looking for wiki contributors willing to show us how they are interacting with references.
The format will be a 1-hour video call, where you would share your screen. More information here.
Interviews can be conducted in English, German or Dutch.
Please note that we probably won’t be able to have sessions with everyone who is interested. Our UX researcher will try to create a good balance of wiki contributors, e.g. in terms of wiki experience, tech experience, editing preferences, gender, disability and more. If you’re a fit, she will reach out to you to schedule an appointment.
Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English.
Hello, the Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects team at Wikimedia Deutschland would like to hear about your experiences using Wikidata in the sibling projects. If you are interested in sharing your opinion and insights, please consider signing up for an interview with us in this Registration form. Currently, we are only able to conduct interviews in English.
The front page of the form has more details about what the conversation will be like, including how we would compensate you for your time.
For more information, visit our project issue page where you can also share your experiences in written form, without an interview. We look forward to speaking with you, Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 08:53, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
You are humbly invited to organize the Feminism and Folklore 2024 writing competition from February 1, 2023, to March 31, 2023 on your local Wikipedia. This year, Feminism and Folklore will focus on feminism, women's issues, and gender-focused topics for the project, with a Wiki Loves Folklore gender gap focus and a folk culture theme on Wikipedia.
You can help Wikipedia's coverage of folklore from your area by writing or improving articles about things like folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, women and queer folklore figures, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch hunting, fairy tales, and more. Users can help create new articles, expand or translate from a generated list of suggested articles.
Organisers are requested to work on the following action items to sign up their communities for the project:
Create a page for the contest on the local wiki.
Set up a campaign on CampWiz tool.
Create the local list and mention the timeline and local and international prizes.
This year, the Wiki Loves Folklore Tech Team has introduced two new tools to enhance support for the campaign. These tools include the Article List Generator by Topic and CampWiz. The Article List Generator by Topic enables users to identify articles on the English Wikipedia that are not present in their native language Wikipedia. Users can customize their selection criteria, and the tool will present a table showcasing the missing articles along with suggested titles. Additionally, users have the option to download the list in both CSV and wikitable formats. Notably, the CampWiz tool will be employed for the project for the first time, empowering users to effectively host the project with a jury. Both tools are now available for use in the campaign. Click here to access these tools
Learn more about the contest and prizes on our project page. Feel free to contact us on our meta talk page or by email us if you need any assistance.
Dear Wiki Community,
You are humbly invited to participate in the Wiki Loves Folklore 2024 an international photography contest organized on Wikimedia Commons to document folklore and intangible cultural heritage from different regions, including, folk creative activities and many more. It is held every year from the 1st till the 31st of March.
You can help in enriching the folklore documentation on Commons from your region by taking photos, audios, videos, and submitting them in this commons contest.
You can also organize a local contest in your country and support us in translating the project pages to help us spread the word in your native language.
Feel free to contact us on our project Talk page if you need any assistance.
Read the charter, go vote and share this note with others in your community. I can confidently say the U4C Building Committee looks forward to your participation.
Apologies for writing in English. If you can translate this message, that would be much appreciated.
Hi. As announced some weeks ago [1] [2], Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes team introduced Reference Previews to many wikis, including this one. This feature shows popups for references in the article text.
While this new feature is already usable on your wiki, most people here are not seeing it yet because your wiki has set a gadget as the default for previewing references. We plan to remove the default flag from the gadget on your wiki soon. This means:
The new default for reference popups on your wiki will be Reference Previews.
However, if you want to keep using the gadget, you can still enable it in your personal settings.
The benefit of having Reference Previews as the default is that the user experience will be consistent across wikis and with the Page Previews feature, and that the software will be easier to maintain overall.
Read the charter, go vote and share this note with others in your community. I can confidently say the U4C Building Committee looks forward to your participation.
Thank you everyone for following the progress of the Universal Code of Conduct. I am writing to you today to announce the outcome of the ratification vote on the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter. 1746 contributors voted in this ratification vote with 1249 voters supporting the Charter and 420 voters not. The ratification vote process allowed for voters to provide comments about the Charter.
A report of voting statistics and a summary of voter comments will be published on Meta-wiki in the coming weeks.
Please look forward to hearing about the next steps soon.
Wikimedia Ukraine, in cooperation with the MFA of Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute, has launched the forth edition of writing challenge "Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month", which lasts from 1st until 31st March 2024. The campaign is dedicated to famous Ukrainian artists of cinema, music, literature, architecture, design and cultural phenomena of Ukraine that are now part of world heritage. We accept contribution in every language! The most active contesters will receive prizes.
We invite you to take part and help us improve the coverage of Ukrainian culture on Wikipedia in your language! Also, we plan to set up a banner to notify users of the possibility to participate in such a challenge! ValentynNefedov (WMUA) (talk)
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members are invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.
Per the charter, there are 16 seats on the U4C: eight community-at-large seats and eight regional seats to ensure the U4C represents the diversity of the movement.
Read more and submit your application on Meta-wiki.
This year, the term of 4 (four) Community- and Affiliate-selected Trustees on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will come to an end [1]. The Board invites the whole movement to participate in this year’s selection process and vote to fill those seats.
The Elections Committee will oversee this process with support from Foundation staff [2]. The Board Governance Committee created a Board Selection Working Group from Trustees who cannot be candidates in the 2024 community- and affiliate-selected trustee selection process composed of Dariusz Jemielniak, Nataliia Tymkiv, Esra'a Al Shafei, Kathy Collins, and Shani Evenstein Sigalov [3]. The group is tasked with providing Board oversight for the 2024 trustee selection process, and for keeping the Board informed. More details on the roles of the Elections Committee, Board, and staff are here [4].
Here are the key planned dates:
May 2024: Call for candidates and call for questions
June 2024: Affiliates vote to shortlist 12 candidates (no shortlisting if 15 or less candidates apply) [5]
June-August 2024: Campaign period
End of August / beginning of September 2024: Two-week community voting period
October–November 2024: Background check of selected candidates
Board's Meeting in December 2024: New trustees seated
Learn more about the 2024 selection process - including the detailed timeline, the candidacy process, the campaign rules, and the voter eligibility criteria - on this Meta-wiki page, and make your plan.
Election Volunteers
Another way to be involved with the 2024 selection process is to be an Election Volunteer. Election Volunteers are a bridge between the Elections Committee and their respective community. They help ensure their community is represented and mobilize them to vote. Learn more about the program and how to join on this Meta-wiki page.
Best regards,
Dariusz Jemielniak (Governance Committee Chair, Board Selection Working Group)
[5] Even though the ideal number is 12 candidates for 4 open seats, the shortlisting process will be triggered if there are more than 15 candidates because the 1-3 candidates that are removed might feel ostracized and it would be a lot of work for affiliates to carry out the shortlisting process to only eliminate 1-3 candidates from the candidate list.
I am writing to you to let you know the voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open now through May 9, 2024. Read the information on the voting page on Meta-wiki to learn more about voting and voter eligibility.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members were invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.
The next language community meeting is scheduled in a few weeks - May 31st at 16:00 UTC. If you're interested, you can sign up on this wiki page.
This is a participant-driven meeting, where we share language-specific updates related to various projects, collectively discuss technical issues related to language wikis, and work together to find possible solutions. For example, in the last meeting, the topics included the machine translation service (MinT) and the languages and models it currently supports, localization efforts from the Kiwix team, and technical challenges with numerical sorting in files used on Bengali Wikisource.
Do you have any ideas for topics to share technical updates related to your project? Any problems that you would like to bring for discussion during the meeting? Do you need interpretation support from English to another language? Please reach out to me at ssethi(__AT__)wikimedia.org and add agenda items to the document here.
You can find the details on this page, as well as the ways to give your feedback from today until the end of the day on June 23, 2024, anywhere on Earth.
You can also share information about this with the interested project communities you work with or support, and you can also help us translate the procedure into more languages, so people can join the discussions in their own language.
Hi everyone! We are the Wikimedia Foundation Web team.
We work on making it easier to read Wikimedia projects as part of the objective "Reading and media experience" of the current year’s annual plan. To achieve this goal, we have introduced the "Accessibility for Reading" beta feature. It adds a menu which works on the Vector 2022 skin and allows logged-in users to choose different font sizes and color schemes based on individual needs.
The menu introduces a new Standard font setting. It slightly increases the size and height of the font. It was selected based on multiple sources. You will find more information on this in the section "About the new Standard font setting".
What will change
We are now ready to make the new Appearance menu available for logged-out and logged-in users.
At the same time, we will also make the Standard option the new default for logged-out users only.
If no breaking technical issues are found, we plan on making this change within the next two weeks.
Later, this menu will also include the option to select dark mode, which for the time being will remain a beta feature. For more information, check out our project page.
About the menu
The new menu will allow logged-in and logged-out users to set preferences for:
Text size and line height (available now as a beta feature): Users will be able to choose between the Small (current default), Standard (recommended for better accessibility), and Large options. Selecting an option will change both the font size and line height of the text.
Dark mode (available now as a beta feature): Users will be able to choose to see the site in night mode on a permanent basis, or select an "automatic" setting which will set day or night mode based on the device or browser preferences.
Content width (previously available as a toggle button): We have moved the content width toggle from an icon at the bottom of the page to a labeled radio button in the new menu. It will work exactly the same as the toggle. The previous toggle button will no longer be available.
This menu has been tested as a beta feature by logged-in users across wikis as well as in user testing with readers. Based on the findings of these tests, we changed the menu to improve discoverability and ease of use, and to accommodate gadget compatibility.
The menu will appear to the right of the page, immediately under the Tools menu if that has been pinned. Unlike the Tools menu, the Appearance menu is pinned by default, but can be unpinned. Once unpinned, it collapses under an icon at the top of the page.
About the new Standard font setting
The "Small" option is the current default. We will be changing this default to "Standard" for logged-out users, while keeping "Small" as the default for logged-in users. The "Standard" and "Large" options were built and tested based on the following:
Academic studies and recommendations for the best average font size for the majority of readers. These recommendations stated that our current size is too small for the majority of people to read comfortably. This means that on average, people read more slowly, strain their eyes while reading, or have difficulty clearly seeing the text. Increasing the font size by default improves these issues for all users, including users who might not have sufficient time to spend adjusting a setting via the appearance menu or browser. Information density is also important, which is why we wanted to increase font size without sacrificing information density. We have achieved this by changing not only font size, but also line height and paragraph spacing.
Designs submitted by more than 630 Wikipedians from across 13 wikis of different languages, scripts, and sizes. The majority (~450) of these users opted for a font size that was larger than the default. "Standard" represents the average of the most popular cluster of responses (15-20 pixels). "Large" represents the need for an even larger option, as represented by the cluster of sizes between 21-26 pixels. You can read more on how we included volunteers in the process and landed on these options.
Beta feature usage showed that the majority of users who interact with the feature at least once opt for a font size that is larger than the current default.
Our works so far and next steps
Logged-in users will remain with the "small" setting for the time being as their default, but can change to any other setting at any time. In a few months, we will study how many logged-in users switch to standard and start a conversation on whether it makes sense for logged-in users to make the switch as well. From the early data from the beta feature, 55% of sessions who interacted with the feature chose to use a setting that was standard or larger.
If you'd like to help, we have a few simple requests for you:
Try out the new menu. Is anything confusing? Do you understand all the labels and how the menu works?
Try out the small, standard, and large sizes, the color schemes, and the width toggle. Reach out to us if you notice any bugs, or have questions or concerns.
Thank you again to everyone who participated in this process and much appreciation to the candidates for your leadership and dedication to the Wikimedia movement and community.
Over the next few weeks, the U4C will begin meeting and planning the 2024-25 year in supporting the implementation and review of the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines. Follow their work on Meta-wiki.
The final text of the Wikimedia Movement Charter is now up on Meta in more than 20 languages for your reading.
What is the Wikimedia Movement Charter?
The Wikimedia Movement Charter is a proposed document to define roles and responsibilities for all the members and entities of the Wikimedia movement, including the creation of a new body – the Global Council – for movement governance.
Join the Wikimedia Movement Charter “Launch Party”
Join the “Launch Party” on June 20, 2024 at 14.00-15.00 UTC (your local time). During this call, we will celebrate the release of the final Charter and present the content of the Charter. Join and learn about the Charter before casting your vote.
