Hiring - Community and Communications Assistant

This job matches the predominant skills of Wikipedians. It involves developing projects within wiki communities as well as content creation.

Responsibilities

• Supporting English wiki communities and helping them to make creative use of the book tool and the PediaPress service
• Assisting users and responding to their questions via email, wiki talk pages, and real-time chat
• Testing new features and creating corresponding help pages and tutorials
• Representing PediaPress and working to improve user satisfaction and community relationships
• Writing blog posts & website text
• Spreading the word about Wikipedia-Books

About you

You should have a passion for wikis, wiki communities, free content and books. You should be fluent in written English and bring the skills to create interesting and eloquent texts.

The ideal candidate should have experience working in wiki communities, be self-motivated, organized, reliable, proactive and goal oriented. MediaWiki markup and templates should be well understood.

This is a part time position and you'd work remotely. If you happen to live around Mainz, Germany you are of course invited to join us in our office.

For more information please send a mail using our contact form.

Do programmers still buy printed books?

In a recent blog post Antonio Cangiono (Technical Evangelist at IBM) reasons about whether programmers still buy printed books. This is a good question as coders are usually no more than a Google search away from the documentation they need. There is close to zero coding related knowledge in books that one could not find online. So the question is not about the content but rather if you are willing to pay for the medium.

Antonio writes:

I spend long hours working and staring at the computer screen. A printed book is a chance to take a break at night, and let my eyes rest a little. I find it refreshing. And let’s face it, for extensive reading, paper is much easier to read from than the screen.

Likewise, when I’m holding a book or have it open on my desk, I’m in “book reading mode”, which makes it far easier to immerse myself in it. This means that I’m focused on the task and can proceed quickly. The only context switch that happens is between the book and the editor/shell, if it’s the kind of book that warrants typing along. If you are reading a book in a browser tab, it’s very easy to think, “I’ll just check my email for a second”, or introduce similar distractions. I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect.

No, he is not alone. The PediaPress team is with him and so are most of the commenters on his post.

Viva Wikimanía

This year's Wikimania was held during 26th–28th August in Buenos Aires. Johannes and I returned last week and and brought two suitcases full of motivation and fresh ideas with us.

Videos of Wikimania presentations are available on Wikimedia Commons, including the keynotes, the many scheduled panels, the lightning talks, and Richard Stallman's speech from Tuesday, before the conference started. The full schedule provides video links to most of the talks and sessions.

I held a presentation about the MediaWiki book tool and our service. It focused on on our past experiences and future developments such as the new UI, custom covers and the imminent launch on the English language Wikipedia.

Bibliográfika – the largest digital printing company in Argentine – sponsored the production of 200 PediaPress books, which were picked up quickly by the attendees. A big thank you to Bibliográfika for the sponsoring!"

The venue in Buenos Aires featured plenty comfortable spaces that allowed to socialize and have inspiring chats. We collected a lot of feedback and suggestions for our service. Notable discussions were about the deployment of the new user interface, publishing Wikipedia books based on the Wikipedia Version 1.0 project and PediaPress as a tool for students.

Kudos to all of the organizers of the Wikimania 2009! And now we are looking forward to next year's Wikimania in Gdańsk!