The (Kind of) New Wikipedian
Today I'm excited to announce that The Wikipedian is relaunching as something a bit different. Not very different, mind you. Since March 2009, the focus of this blog has been explaining Wikipedia (and other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation) to the non-insider. We've covered minor controversies, major news stories, and how the project is growing and evolving. That's not going to change.
What is changing is the format: for the past four years, The Wikipedian has mostly consisted of long, essay-like posts, often published weeks—or months—apart. And that's just no way to run a blog. Meanwhile, I've missed out on writing about many interesting stories. More often than not, I've given them a link over at this site's related Twitter account. Yet some topics deserve more than 140 characters but fewer than 500 words.
Drawing inspiration from John Gruber's Daring Fireball and Jason Kottke's kottke.org, as of this post The Wikipedian has jettisoned its clunky, tri-column front page. We're going single column, baby! Essay-length posts are not going away entirely; when there's time and inspiration, I'll write them. However, importantly, The Wikipedian will not go silent. Perhaps long overdue, we're getting into the whole brevity thing. More to come—soon.