defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics since 1982
Stage design of the Enchanted Garden by Hermann Burghart for the 1886 premiere of Karl Goldmark's opera Merlin . (Herman Burghart on Wikimedia Commons // Public domain) One in three pictures you see on Wikipedia was added through UploadWizard, a tool I designed in 2009. Over the past 15 years, 1.8 million unique volunteers have uploaded over 42 million files with UploadWizard to Commons,…
Krzysztof Golik on Wikimedia Commons // CC-BY-SA 4.0 . AI is changing everything. But for disabled and neurodivergent people, the changes aren't just interesting; they're personal. Generative, conversational, and agentic AI tools are beginning to fill long-standing gaps in accessibility at a time when inclusion is still more promise than practice. From planning and emotional regulation to…
Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash The importance of Revenue Strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation lies in two main factors: the uncertain future facing us, which might endanger existing revenue sources, and the impetus to grow, mandated by the ambitions of the Wikimedia movement. The following is a summary of my reflection on Revenue Strategy for the Foundation's Advancement department .…
Fred Kearney on Unsplash . Knowledge has real consequences on human lives, both for individuals and for societies. As I reckoned with the privilege of growing up surrounded by books, I deepened my understanding of knowledge and the real power it holds, both as an instrument of liberation, and as a vital component of our collective survival. The privilege of knowledge Janko Ferlič on Unsplash . It…
The Ladies' home journal (1889) // Public domain. As part of my work on revenue strategy for Wikimedia, I imagined three scenarios about the world in 2031 and the organization's place in it. I used these stories to spark discussions and shift conversations from day-to-day concerns and busywork to longer-term strategic thinking. The scenarios all contained both favorable and unfavorable story…
Two years ago, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum. As I learned more about myself and the way my brain worked, I started to look at past experiences through the lens of this newly-found aspect. In this essay, I share some of what I've learned along the way about my successes, my failures, and many things that confused me in the past, notably in my experiences in the Wikimedia movement.…
In 2014, I posted a few photos, I continued to work on technical communications at Wikimedia before a role change, I learned more about myself, I moved to California, and I hiked a lot. 2014 in failures Let's begin with what didn't work and get it out of the way. In January 2014, I started posting some of my photos on this site. I have accumulated tens of thousands of photos over the past eight…
Where our heroes embark on their second move a quarter of a world away, but not before planning it thoroughly. In previous episodes I lived in San Francisco for a year in 2009–2010, when I first started working for the Wikimedia Foundation on the Multimedia Usability Project. Unfortunately, I had to move back to France because my partner couldn't get a visa at the time. When I first came to the…
42,812. That's the number of files currently residing in my “photos” folder. They span seven years of photography, three continents, and an evolving mix of taste, experience and equipment. This mosaic marks the inauguration of the gallery section of this site, where I'll be sharing the pictures I like the most. To be fair, many of the photos sitting in my hard drive are similar to each other. I…
If you've ever wanted to be kept informed of technical changes likely to impact your Wikimedia experience, you'll want to subscribe to Tech News, a weekly newsletter than can be delivered directly to your talk page. Tech News is a weekly tech newsletter about Wikimedia sites delivered on your talk page and translated into many languages. The amount of technical activity happening across the…