Wikimedians at Maker Faire, brief news

San Francisco Wikimedians at Maker Faire

The Wikimedia Maker Faire 2010 booth

For the third year, members of the Bay Area/San Francisco Wikimedia meetup group had a booth at Maker Faire, held May 22 and 23, 2010 in San Mateo, California. Maker Faire is put on by Make Magazine and O'Reilly Media, and features a wide range of "makers" – from people who work with electronics to those who build custom bicycles. The faire has a wide range of steampunk and Burning Man-style art, as well as educational, science and technology and craft-centered booths from local and national makers. The Faire typically attracts nearly 100,000 people.

The Wikimedia booth this year featured computers to demonstrate the projects, displays featuring a visualization of anonymous edits, and two games (the Wikipedia Game and a game to guess various Wikipedia languages). The booth was very popular—thousands of people stopped by to chat about the projects and pick up stickers and buttons provided by the Wikimedia Foundation. About a dozen community members and Foundation employees staffed the booth throughout the weekend.

Briefly

Naoko Komura, the Wikimedia Foundation's Head of User Experience (UX) Programs, will leave the Foundation on June 17. The announcement came shortly after the deployment of the new "Vector" skin on the English Wikipedia and other major projects, concluding the usability project as planned when it was initiated in January 2009 (see Signpost coverage). In March this year however, the project was made permanent as UX Programs and it was announced that Komura would stay on as a member of the permanent Wikimedia staff (see Signpost coverage).

The Wikimedia Foundation has hired Ryan Kaldari (User:Kaldari, an administrator on the English Wikipedia and Commons) to develop fundraising software.

According to a 27 May progress update, Flagged Revisions is mostly complete except for user interface issues, which the developers are looking for an "HTML & CSS guru" to solve. A discussion concluded this about changing the terminology of "Flagged Protection", which will now be called "Pending Changes".