The results of the 2008 Wikimedia Board of Trustees election ended the 21st of June, 2008. The winner is a polyglot (multilingual) Wikipedia administrator (for Wikipedia Chinese) named Ting Chen (username "Wing" on Wikipedia).

Wing is involved in other Wikimedia projects as well, and has a freestyle "me" page on Wikimedia's website. I put the Chinese version here for fun. He also wrote it in German, French and English.

Wikimedia is in charge of quite a few projects that have revolutionized access to information by making the input collective and empowering and protecting it with the GNU Free Documentation License. This is the same license for any content originally published on Free Language or Freestyle Language or other unrev.org projects. You are encouraged to reuse the information however you like, make it better, etc.

Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks and Wiktionary have produced amazing language learning materials, both directly and indirectly. You can view any page on Wikipedia and see other languages for which that page is also available. It's not a translation, it's just the same page on another language's Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wiktionary. It's an awesome way to read up on a topic in multiple languages and familiarize yourself with vocabulary related to any subject you choose. Handy and freestyle, as well.

From Ting Chen's Bio Page

你好，

我叫陈霆，在大多数维基的版本中我的用户名是Wing。我住在德国美因茨，我在德语、英语和中文的维基百科上都有活动。我说德、英和汉语，以及一点法语。我是中文维基的管理员之一和中文维基在这里的大使。

如果你想与我对话，或说一声你好，请你不要客气。

:-) Wing

See Wing's bio.

From Wikipedia

The 2008 Wikimedia Board Election Committee would like to announce the results of the 2008 Board Elections. The winner is Ting Chen. These results will be certified by the Board of Trustees at their next meeting, where he will be appointed effective 16 July 2008. This position will be effective until July 2009.

In total, 3019 valid ballots were cast; the specific results are as outlined below. A complete dump of the ballots cast is available here.

Read more about the Wikimedia 2008 Board of Trustees Election.

This dude is a riot. A whole semester of Spanish, freestyled!.

I do not endeavor to learn every foreign language that I embrace to the point of being able to give a dissertation on a complex subject or boast an immense and scholarly vocabulary. What I am interested in is communicating with other people, understanding them, making them laugh, sharing thoughts and ideas, learning from them and having them somehow benefit from their interactions with me. En bref, an exchange.

It is the ability to communicate with the world, one person at a time, that propels me to dive into the next set of sound sequences and decode them.

That is part of what makes me a freestyle language learner. I don't mind neglecting my French or Spanish (letting them get a little rusty) in order to dedicate time to becoming conversational in Chinese or Russian.

I say conversational (or conversationally fluent) because that's what I'm all about: conversations. Of course, I also love to read and research in other languages, and I will always make a concerted effort to learn their writing systems, but my main focus remains the person in front of me. Or perhaps the group with whom I am enjoying a meal or a coffee or a beer. I want to create sparks where darkness exists.

Another motivation when it comes to learning languages is stretching and expanding my mind linguistically and culturally; learning new ways to express myself and the world around me. I am at the center of my own Universe, and in learning myriad ways to ingest, digest and express where I am and what I am up to, I become more powerful inside of myself. In doing this, I become more aware by developing a "meta-understanding" of the world in which I exist.

Learning to understand and be understood in foreign languages has allowed me to explore and appreciate more things and meet and greet more people in life. As they might say in German, it has expanded my Weltenschauung.

I have often heard that "language is power". I know this to be a fact. Power, as I understand it in this context, refers both to pure information and to the ability to extend myself in a broader network. In learning to communicate in a multiplicity of tongues, I consciously place myself where most others are not; I intentionally empower my human form to give and receive a wider range of thoughts, ideas, cultural patterns, literature, art, music... You name it, and I'd love to learn to say it.

Tag clouds are sweet. They are visual depictions of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. (Source) They are freestyle for sure. People bang them out as they post away online to categorize words, photos, videos and combos thereof.

I think a lot about tags since I have quite a few blogs and one decent site. The more I create online, the more I enjoy the visual expressions of my research that these tag clouds morph into.

I have three main types of categories on this site: languages, key terms and keywords. When you see them you know the kind of content that resides in the freestylelanguage.com database.

Check out these freestyle visual expressions and please let me know what you think about this way of tagging web content. Does it feel like art to you? ;)

Languages

Key Terms

Keywords