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User:Sj/Experience

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Wikipedia:

  • Worked extensively on WikiProject Years
  • Cleaned up the Numbers project & templates
  • Drafted early Press releases
  • Ran regular meetings for a few months and a "list of articles all Wikipedias should have" drive to attract new editors to the Swahili Wikipedia

Commons:

  • Made contact with the organizers of the World Digital Library to discuss long-term sharing of new media. They are interested in providing a feed of new additions for inclusion in Commons
  • Ran a media competition at the first two Wikimanias with sannse and Bdk, to promote the best images and illustrations from the projects

Wiktionary:

  • Made contact with Dicologos, the world's largest (and quirkiest) translation dictionary. For a while, they made all of their definitions GFDL, and contracted with someone to help share data between the projects. Currently on hold on their end, but they remain interested
  • Helped review the m:OmegaWiki database design

Wikibooks:

  • Helped the owner of Textbook Revolution migrate to a MediaWiki instance running Semantic MediaWiki so that they can share data directly with Wikibooks and other wiki textbook projects
  • Worked with CK-12's CTO when they were designing their licensing and technical plans, later settling on MediaWiki as part of their backend and a CC-BY license for their texts. They are still in the process of designing an export feature that would allow books to be posted directly to WB

Wikiversity:

  • Helped facilitate a formal presentation of the idea of Wikiversity as a project while on the Special Projects Committee. Wikispecies had recently been started, and there was already a loss of energy for starting new projects at the Foundation level; however after many months of revising the project proposal, it was accepted. (With more attention, this process could be made much easier)
  • Attended a recent 'OER Discovery' conference in Cambridge with Brion; proposed asking Wikiversity to be part of a global plan for more accessible OER materials as a neutral space for collaboration.

Wikinews:

  • Was an early English Wikinews reporter, covering a few conferences and events and getting photographs of the presenters
  • Helped set up the Wikinews accreditation policy, after once designing my own badge

Wikisource:

  • Started the Page/Nahuatl Nahuatl Wikisource portal
  • Discussed with the Perseus Project having their Classics students upload page images and approximate OCR of notable primary sources, in Greek, Latin, Arabic, French and English, starting this summer

Technical:

  • Facilitated a meeting at UNICEF in New York in 2007 with Merrick Schaefer where we came up with the first UNIWIKI spec and layout. Their team went on to produce one of the more beautiful sets of MW extensions.
  • Contributed a few dozen bugs and comments to Bugzilla

Community initiatives and planning:

  • Wrote the first Three-year plan during the 2004 community effort to help the Foundation plan
  • Started the Initiatives page to help scope out existing groups and efforts

License releases:

  • Worked with Nina Paley this Spring to make her archive of comics available as source material
  • Worked with the CSound community to produce a catalog of thousands of freely-licensed sounds.
  • Contacted the Whole Earth Catalog publishers and got them to freely license their first 5 catalogs

Presentations and events:

  • Co-organized the Wikimania program in 2005 and 2006, inviting speakers from library, dictionary, media and journalism projects
  • Served as a reviewer for wiki papers at Wikimania and WikiSym
  • Gave a popular lecture on Wikipedia and volunteer-run projects at MIT's Sloan School each spring for the past 4 years
  • Ran Wikipedia workshops at Harvard College, the Simmons Libary School, and the Special Librarians Association annual conference
  • Recently attended a Wikipedia Gateway Symposium about using the scans and text of the Million Books Project to enhance Wikipedia and Wikibooks

Social events:

  • Founded the Boston Wikipedia Meetup Group, which has met almost 50 times since 2005. We have run many local talks, workshops, and seminar
  • Worked on Wikimania in 2005 and 2006, particularly outreach to speakers and donors, and organization of travel scholarships. Hosted Wikimania in 2006 in Cambridge, with lots of help from a great team and local sponsors
  • Helped with the recent NYC Wikiconference. Took part in the Wikimania bid committee for the past three years.

Translation:

  • Organized translations of early site-wide notices, and core pages about the Foundation when it and the wmf-wiki were being founded
  • Set up a translation structure for the Quarto, which had hundreds of translators and was a testing grounds for different templates and techniques

Offline distribution:

  • Founded the static content group and later the wikireader mailing list, to coordinate different efforts to produce offline readers for Wikipedia and sister projects
  • Started a WikiBrowse project to develop a compressed offline reader for use on OLPC laptops. Currently this is being used by 400,000 children and teachers, with English and Spanish snapshots
  • Compiled a shelf of children's books from Wikibooks, for distribution to primary schools via OLPC (as above)