The Wikimedia blogs family expands

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I’m happy to welcome two new members in the Wikimedia blogs family: the Community blog, and the Global blog.
As the Wikimedia Foundation grows, so does our need to communicate with the rest of the community. Our blogs are a major communication channel to share news and accomplishments of our staff and volunteers.

A collage of the four banners used for the different blogs
Each blog can be recognized by its header.

Recently, we’ve started to publish more often, to increase transparency, understanding and collaboration. These new dedicated blogs are a way for us to structure the conversation with our community, much like we did in the past with the Tech blog.
Rather than creating completely separate blogs, we’ve decided to build on the existing Wikimedia blog. For those familiar with WordPress, it means the community & global blogs are categories that we’re simply showing more prominently than regular categories. More details are available in the history of the Wikimedia Blog 2011 overhaul page on meta.
The new blogs also have shortcuts that you can bookmark: http://communitydiff.wikimedia.org and http://globaldiff.wikimedia.org.
The Techblog, which was living separately, is now fully integrated with the Wikimedia blog; from now on, our readers will be able to find all our news in one central place.
If you’re only interested in a specific topic, you can still subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed available at the top of each blog, or in your browser’s URL field. You can subscribe to the “Main blog/Highlights” section to be notified only of major news.
We’ve also taken this opportunity to upgrade the software and fix a few bugs in the theme.
We’ll continue to improve the blogs incrementally over the next few months. We already have a few ideas, but we’d love to hear your opinions in the comments below or on m:Talk:Wikimedia Blog/2011 overhaul.

Guillaume Paumier

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Hey Guillaume, nice work. The more blogging, the better 🙂 This blog is almost becoming a “planet” in its own right! However I find the names a little odd. I would expect “Highlights” to be a selection from the other categories, rather than a category in its own right. “Highlights” should perhaps be called “Foundation”. A real “highlights” category is a good idea too though. “Community” is great (I imagine/hope you would also accept posts from community members on occasion). Finally “Global” is quite odd, creating a separate category for it implies that some things that Wikimedia does are _not_… Read more »

addendum: even I find “Regional” is better than “Global”. Sorry to harp on that but I guess it is a sore point!

From the operations side the blogs were also documented into our configuration management system. This improves ease of backups and redeployment, and further streamlining and automating our operations processes.

Brianna: I agree, the choice of the names hasn’t been easy. Our articles are really all “Foundation news”, so we decided not to use that name. Perhaps we could have a “Main blog” separate from “Highlights”, but some thought it might be confusing. About “Global”: the names basically reflect the way the Foundation is structured: with a Tech department, a Community department, and a Global development department. The latter encompasses activities like the India and Brazil initiatives, Mobile strategy, Business and Wikimania. It’s difficult to find another word to describe all these activities (“Regional” wouldn’t fit with Mobile, for example),… Read more »

Does anyone happen to know what the new font for the graphic banners/headers are? (“Wikimedia blog”, “Tech blog”, etc.)

Fetchcomms: yes, it’s the Ubuntu font: http://font.ubuntu.com