Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2015/November

Community Wishlist Survey
Hi everyone!

The Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is focused on building improved curation and moderation tools for experienced Wikimedia contributors. We're now starting a Community Wishlist Survey to find the most useful projects that we can work on.

For phase 1 of the survey, we're inviting all active contributors to submit brief proposals, explaining the project that you'd like us to work on, and why it's important. Phase 1 will last for 2 weeks. In phase 2, we'll ask you to vote on the proposals. Afterwards, we'll analyze the top 10 proposals and create a prioritized wishlist.

While most of this process will be conducted in English, we're inviting people from any Wikimedia wiki to submit proposals. We'll also invite volunteer translators to help translate proposals into English.

Your proposal should include: the problem that you want to solve, who would benefit, and a proposed solution, if you have one. You can submit your proposal on the Community Wishlist Survey page, using the entry field and the big blue button. We will be accepting proposals for 2 weeks, ending on November 23. We're looking forward to hearing your ideas!

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:30, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016 scholarships ambassadors needed
Hello! Wikimania 2016 scholarships will soon be open; by the end of the week we'll form the committee and we need your help, see Scholarship committee for details.

If you want to carefully review nearly a thousand applications in January, you might be a perfect committee member. Otherwise, you can volunteer as "ambassador": you will observe all the committee activities, ensure that people from your language or project manage to apply for a scholarship, translate scholarship applications written in your language to English and so on. Ambassadors are allowed to ask for a scholarship, unlike committee members.

Wikimania 2016 scholarships subteam 10:48, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata data access is coming
Hi everyone :)

A while ago you received access to the interwiki links from Wikidata. Everything seems to be going well so I'd like to move on to the second stage. You will get access to the actual data in Wikidata like the date of birth of a person. You'll be able to make use of them in your templates via Lua or a new parser function (#property). We'll be enabling this on December 2nd. This will be the day for Wikinews, Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki. I hope this will open up great new possibilities for you and make your work easier. If you have questions please come to d:Wikidata:Sister projects. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:24, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Your input requested on the proposed #FreeBassel banner campaign
''This is a message regarding the proposed 2015 Free Bassel banner. Translations are available.''

Hi everyone,

This is to inform all Wikimedia contributors that a straw poll seeking your involvement has just been started on Meta-Wiki.

As some of your might be aware, a small group of Wikimedia volunteers have proposed a banner campaign informing Wikipedia readers about the urgent situation of our fellow Wikipedian, open source software developer and Creative Commons activist, Bassel Khartabil. An exemplary banner and an explanatory page have now been prepared, and translated into about half a dozen languages by volunteer translators.

We are seeking your involvement to decide if the global Wikimedia community approves starting a banner campaign asking Wikipedia readers to call on the Syrian government to release Bassel from prison. We understand that a campaign like this would be unprecedented in Wikipedia's history, which is why we're seeking the widest possible consensus among the community.

Given Bassel's urgent situation and the resulting tight schedule, we ask everyone to get involved with the poll and the discussion to the widest possible extent, and to promote it among your communities as soon as possible.

(Apologies for writing in English; please kindly translate this message into your own language.)

Thank you for your participation!

''Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 21:47, 25 November 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help