I recently had to investigate how to customize the “meta” widget provided by WordPress. I couldn’t find a good how-to at the time, so I wanted to share how I did it, in case other people needed to do the same.
In 2011, I authored a chapter about the architecture of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia and its sister sites, for inclusion in the book The Architecture of Open Source Applications, volume 2. The chapter was based on the shared knowledge of MediaWiki developers, and written in collaboration with Sumana Harihareswara.
A long-awaited feature added by volunteer developer Bryan Tong Minh.
From 2011 to 2014, I managed technical communications at the Wikimedia Foundation. This notably included: assembling, editing and publishing monthly technical reports; authoring and editing technical blog posts; and creating and maintaining tools and processes for project documentation.
A behind-the-scenes tour of the project.
Free knowledge is the foundation of all Wikimedia projects: anyone is free to use, modify and redistribute the content for any purpose. But copyright and free licenses are very confusing for new users, especially when they want to contribute pictures and other media files. A new illustrated licensing tutorial will now guide new users through the basics of copyright and free licenses to make their first steps easier.
Have you ever had a hard time finding your language in a web interface? The Universal language picker aims to solve this problem by accepting any valid input from the user and associating it with the language value stored in the software.
If you’ve ever tried to upload a file to Wikimedia Commons, you may have grown frustrated. Our new upload wizard aims to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia projects, and the first test results look promising.
Over the past few months, I’ve been coordinating the preparation of a formal User experience (UX) study for the Multimedia usability project. Basically, it means observing how “real” users interact with the Wikimedia Commons in order to improve it. Videos of the testing have now been published in order to share them with the community.
Three weeks ago, I attended the KDE Akademy 2010 conference in Tampere, Finland. Besides the talk Parul Vora and I gave to share experience about User experience, I also took this opportunity to meet with the KDE community and discuss collaboration opportunities.