Mailing List Archive

Wikimedia Quarto
Hi all,

I'd like to say a few words regarding our brand new
newsletter.

For those who missed the fun, many contributors have
been working in the past few weeks on our first global
newsletter.

Please, see
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto/0409/En.

This is the english version, but 5 versions are
already finished
* english
* french
* japanese
* polish
* chinese

and several others are near completion and hopefully
will be done in the next few days/weeks : Ar: De: Es:
Fi: It: and Sv:


The newsletter idea was several times mentionned last
summer on meta. In particular, Angela and I thought it
could be sent to members of the Foundation.
A few weeks ago Jimbo also mentionned he would like to
find a way to better communicate his thoughts and
points of view to the whole community. He pointed out
that his communication was limited by the language
barrier.

I then suggested we do a quarterly letter to inform
people of Jimbo and the board thoughts and activities,
as well as report what has been going on in the global
community.

Improving the communication within the community and
increasing the visibility of the Foundation activity
to contributors, to readers and to donators is very
important. I think this newsletter is one of those
steps in this direction.

We also wished that this first quaterly letter
coincide both with the 1.000.000 Wikipedia articles
announcement and the 1st trimester of activity of
Angela and I. But the problem was very very short
delays !!! And naturally a huge amount of work to
provide. Not only huge, but definitly requiring a lot
of coordination.

I asked Sj if he could be the coordinator of the
newsletter. I was sure he would do a very good job and
I knew he would love it ;-)

I am extremely glad I did ask him, and he accepted,
because I think Sj made a wonderful job and I would
really like to issue a special thank you note to him
for making this dream come true. I think he has been
devoting many hours on it, with optimism and cheerful
mood. A hand of iron in velvet gloves. I hope he is
very proud because he should be :-)

This newsletter has been set up in an incredible short
time (resulting in a few overlappings between writing
and translating, sorry about that).
Its great design was made by Villy, who probably also
dedicated a month wikipedia-time on it. Dozens of
different people have been contributing to its
content; dozen of editors from many different
languages have been contributing to its translation.
We had a very nice and interesting interview from
Ward. Many editors also helped proofreading, typo
correcting, frame fixing etc... May they all be
thanked.

5 versions are currently final, and have been
transferred to the wikimediafoundation website and
will be advertised on the local projects.
There is still some work on them to do. More editors
are still working on the other versions and I guess we
will end up withabout 10 fully translated versions
which is really great. Next steps will be to have all
of them adequately set on the foundation website, made
visible on projects, and slowly to work on a pdf or
print version.

In all cases, I hope all those who worked on it had
pleasure to do so, and feel proud of the result. I
really thank all of you; it gave me a very warm
feeling to see we could so well and so quickly build
up such a common project (of course, I should not feel
surprised by this, but... still... even after nearly 3
years on wikipedia, I am still regularly amazed :-)).
I think it was an important thing to do, and among
other reasons, I think it was a great way to have
editors from many languages working together on a
common global project. I also hope it will help
smaller projects to feel more involved and drain more
people to get interested in meta activities.

There are some flaws in the letter naturally, I hope
readers will forgive us. There will be some feedback
both on the letter or on its editorial organisation,
or on the content itself to provide. Please do not
hesitate to give us your feedback. Perhaps on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto#Feedback,
so we can have an even better letter in 3 months.

Anthere




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Re: Quarto news : first newsletter rundown [ In reply to ]
Inaugural Quarto news, in brief :

Finished HTML newsletters are available in English, French, German,
Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Chinese. We have
good partial translations in Arabic and Korean, and the founder's
letter was also translated into Dutch, Kannada, and Finnish.
Please distribute links to the appropriate newsletter when explaining
Wikimedia in other languages.

Finished newsletters online :
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto
Partial newsletter translations : see the language-list at the top of
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/1/En:

REMINDERS:
* There is a separate low-traffic mailing list for people interested
in working on the newsletter (quarto-l) and another for translation of
this and other project-wide content (translators-l)

* There are sign-up lists for people who want PDF or print versions of
the newsletter
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WQ

* We interviewed Larry Lessig and Brad Fitzpatrick for the second newsletter.
Who to interview next is still up in the air. Please add to the list of
suggested interviewees here :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia Quarto/Interviews

* Letters to the editor and content submissions (of clever images, quotes,
or articles about local projects) can be sent to : newsletter@wikimedia.org

========================================

Aurevilly did some magnificent work on the cover, and produced something
both beautiful and easy to internationalize, capturing the joyful
spirit of this
past year. It still gives me pleasure every time I see it, and that is probably
how I will always remember The Year Before The Year Of The Wiki.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Image:Newsletter_1_Cover_FR_800px.png

I was also regularly surprised by the enthusiastic body of translators,
who invested more time into the newsletter production than anyone else.
Aphaia in particular has devoted herself to translation and helping others
do the same, and is now helping with much of the development of the
second newsletter. Most recently, hpnadig has hacked out a Kannada
translation of the first newsletter, and is excited about using it to teach
people in India about Wikipedia.

More recently, the number of active translators for Translation of the Week
has grown to include 30 languages; I hope there will be letters, project
reports, and other content submissions from each of those languages in the
future.

Glad tidings to all,
+sj+