In the year 2000, Dries Buytaert created Drupal, a freely licensed and open source tool to manage websites, as a bulletin board for his college dorm. Since Dries released the software and a community of thousands of volunteer developers have added and improved modules, Drupal has grown immensely popular. Drupal won the overall Open CMS Award in 2007, and some speakers in Drupal's spacious developer's room at FOSDEM 2008 were dreaming aloud of its world domination.
Buytaert (now 29) just finished his doctoral thesis and has founded the start-up Acquia. The new company wants to become Drupal's best friend, with the help of an all-star team and US$7 million collected from venture capitalists. Wikinews reporter Michaël Laurent sat down with Dries in Brussels to discuss these recent exciting developments.
>> Click here to read the interview
>> Open software developers meet at FOSDEM 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Wikinews exclusive interview: Drupal founder Dries Buytaert
Open software developers meet at FOSDEM 2008
During the two-day-long conference, presentations touched on programming languages, build systems, gaming (such as Battle for Wesnoth, Crystal Space, Globulation 2), packaging, virtualisation and web applications. The conference also has rooms were developers who usually work together via the internet can meet in real life and share thoughts on their projects; CentOS, Fedora, CrossDesktop, Drupal, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenSUSE and X.org had the biggest rooms this year. The corridors were filled with stands from organisations such as the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Free Knowledge Foundation, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, etc.
Since FOSDEM brings many European open software developers to Brussels, it also provides an important networking opportunity. FOSDEM kicks off Belgium-style on Friday with a beer event, but during the entire weekend several groups hold parties all over town. Wikinews reporters attended a barbecue hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Friday, were it interviewed EFF and Open Rights Group representatives on the upcoming E.U. proposal to extend copyright for performers to 95 years. Wikinews also interviewed Drupal founder and Acquia CTO Dries Buytaert about Drupal and how Acquia will relate to its developer community.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Ask your question to Drupal founder Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, the freely licensed and open source content managing system, agreed to an interview with Wikinews.
Buytaert just finished his doctoral thesis and has founded the startup company Acquia.
If you have any questions about Drupal, free and open software or what's happening for him in the near future, you can post your questions on the interview preparation page or e-mail them to User:Stevenfruitsmaak .
Friday, January 25, 2008
Wikinews Picture of the Year 2007
The winner has been announced in the 2007 Wikinews Picture of the Year election. The photo was taken by Wikinews reporter and photographer David Shankbone, and captures the protest in front of Columbia University, that marked the controversial debate with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September.
Invited to participate in a debate during his visit to New York City this week to address the United Nations General Assembly, Ahmadinejad engaged University president Lee Bollinger on a number of topics, including his country's human rights record, opinions on Israel and the Holocaust and the role of nuclear weapons and terrorism on the global stage.
The images of the event are gathered in a designated category on Commons.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Jerusalem Post covers David Shankbone's Israel Trip
On Sunday The Jerusalem Post wrote an article about David Shankbone's upcoming trip to Israel for Wikimedia work, citing it as an "acknowledgement of the importance that the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has in shaping opinion..."
The story is found here.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Wikimedia fundraiser highlights webcomic community's frustration with Wikipedia guidelines
>>Full storyOn Monday, October 22, as the latest Wikimedia fundraiser started up, Wikinews reporter Brian McNeil thought his own small donation could be turned into a bigger donation by his buying some advertising on a popular website and encouraging others to contribute. With this in mind he approached Howard Tayler, creator of the Schlock Mercenary webcomic.
Tayler's response was not as McNeil expected, prompting a Wikinews investigation. Tayler refused to help the foundation raise money although he conceded that he does sometimes use the site. Instead he explained that the webcomic community feels slighted by Wikipedia since over 50 articles on webcomics were deemed not to meet the notability guidelines and were deleted from Wikipedia during January and February of 2007. Some members of the webcomics community considered this unacceptable.
Whilst some of the comic related articles deleted did not qualify for inclusion in the encyclopedia under Wikipedia guidelines, the deletion of a large number of articles in such a short time period struck some webcomics writers and fans as a selective purge.
Much of the criticism has been focused on Wikipedia editor Dragonfiend, who describes notability as "whether a topic has been noted by independent reputable sources". She has said that "If we include every article that anyone wants to write, then the encyclopedia becomes useless because nobody can find the actual needle of worthwhile information on a topic hidden in that hay stack of trivia." She believes Wikipedia should only have articles on webcomics like Penny Arcade, Get Your War On, Fetus-X, and Achewood.
This deletion of webcomics articles has not set well with many in the webcomics community. Modern Tales editor and Websnark blogger Eric Burns has written that "There are people -- and Dragonfiend is clearly one of them -- who are clearly going through Wikipedia looking for articles that should be weeded out as non-notable. and they're doing it in fields they clearly -- I mean, clearly -- have no interest, experience or knowledge."
>> Read the full article on Wikinews
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Wikinews interviews World Wide Web co-inventor Robert Cailliau
Photo: CERNLast January Dr. Cailliau retired from CERN, the European particle physics lab where the WWW emerged. Wikinews offered the engineer a virtual beer from his native country Belgium, and conducted an e-mail interview with him (which started about three weeks ago) about the history and the future of the web and his life and work.
History of the WWW
Mr. Cailliau talks about the challenges he faced in the early 1990s: "A lot of incomprehension, later also some jealousy. And at the start it was difficult to convince the managers that it would grow into a useful tool."
"Looking back and from the many conversations with web and internet pioneers, I think not much has changed fundamentally," Cailliau says. Nothing new under the sun: scalable vectors, style sheets and many other things that have made a breakthrough during the last year, already existed back in the early WWW days.
But not everything went as Cailliau envisioned it: "I predicted that search engines would not cope in the long term. Maybe the existence of Google is only an indication that there is still only little available on the web."
Mr. Cailliau is a man who has a strong vision, a provocateur at times: "We advanced far too fast with far too many developers who ran away in far too many different directions without much thinking. ... Especially the geeks in the U.S. often behaved like cowboys: shoot first, think later."
Web 2.0 and future directives
Robert Cailliau has edited his own Wikipedia article, and contributes from time to time (for example on Commons). "I use the Wikipedia often. I also contribute here and there. A very great work, looked at with a lot of jealousy. In almost all comments about the Wikipedia I perceive in the background some jealousy and intolerance," he says.
Cailliau strives for more international regulations on online behaviour. He criticizes the fact that websites increasingly take things into their own hands, amid the legal vacuum governments leave us with when it comes to new technologies. "We see more and more cases in which commercial companies take the law in their own hands. And that makes me worried about what the commercial sector will do in the vacuum that the governments just let be."
The WWW father also realises the potential downside of his invention. In contrast to Tim Berners-Lee, Cailliau is not a fan of the semantic web: "It's also a little early to use intelligent machinery. ... You have no idea how "half witted" machines can be. ... Maybe here too we should think and experiment first before we let the beast loose!" He expects an increasing importance for the virtual world: The Matrix, but worse.
You can read more of his ideas about the history and future of the World Wide Web, web 2.0 and wiki's and more comments in the full story on Wikinews. Mr. Cailliau has answered the questions in Dutch too, and a Dutch release of the interview is scheduled soon.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Wikinews covers the 2007 World Deaf Swimming Championships
>>Full Story
After covering Wikimania, Wikinews user Rico Shen from Taipei, Taiwan has now committed himself to reporting from the 2007 World Deaf Swimming Championships in his city, which opened August 11.
The event is unique because only deaf athletes can participate, and because organizing a competition for deaf swimmers requires specific sign language interpreters, technical staff (for example to operate the 'start' and 'foul' lights) and referees.
Two articles about the event have been posted, the first covering the opening ceremony and the first day, while a second article brings news from day two. Shen's photos can be found in a designated category on Wikimedia Commons, and one of his original images is featured on today's main page, in the News In Pictures section.
Taipei will also host the 2009 Deaflympics.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Wikinews reports from Wikimania 2007
Wikimania 2007 Site Events warming up for main conference
Counting down to Wikimania 2007, the Site Events such as "Hacking Days & Extra", "One Laptop Per Child Curriculum Jam", and the "Citizen Journalism Unconference" preluded the main conference.
On August 1, Cary Bass and many other programmers participated in the Hacking Days. Mike "b6s" Jiang hosted this two-day long event where programmers can exchange experiences.
That same day, the One Laptop Per Child Curriculum Jam kicked off. Project Director Samuel "SJ" Klein invited many teams with an interest in freely licensed content to produce learning materials, which youngsters from 6 to 16 years of age could judge.
The Citizen Journalism Unconference was held August 2. It hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and Public Television Services Taiwan (PTS). The organization invited Frontier Foundation Researcher Shu-fang Tsai and Facilitator of Institute of Culture Affairs Taiwan Gail West to host this unconference. The Unconference was held in an open space style. Topics for discussion were created by participants at the unconference.
In this unconference, participants talked about lots of free content portals comparisons, such as PeoPo by PTS Taiwan, the characteristics and role of citizen journalists, the comparisons between citizen journalism and professional journalism, and the future of citizen journalism.
Wikimania 2007 begins in Taipei, Taiwan
The third annual conference for users of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimania, began on August 3. Over 1,100 people registered from 98 countries. Fifty five percent of attendees were from Taiwan. There are over 100 presenters holding a total of 65 sessions.
Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, in the opening to the conference, reviewed what has been accomplished in the past year. Among the accomplishments are the creation of the Wikimedia Taiwan chapter, and the creation of Wikiversity. Florence also said that the Russian Wikipedia was the fastest growing Wikipedia, with the Chinese Wikipedia coming second. There still is huge disparity in language though, with projects such as the Afrikaans Wikipedia having 6 million native speakers, but less then 8,000 articles.
On the second day of Wikimania 2007 in Taipei, Group Sessions continued, while the Virtual i.d.ea Interactive Net Art 2007 Exhibition attracted visitors and participants. This exhibition shows the creation of interactions by using creative contents. Four college teams and two individuals exhibited their work. The exhibition is mainly focused on Interactive Net Art.
The Wikimania 2007 Conference will end on August 5. Submitting free-licensed works for the Wikimania Awards is still in progress, the deadline being 8:00 a.m. August 5 (Taipei time). Wikimania Award winners will be announced at the Closing Ceremony.
