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.

I just finshed skimreading (most of) an article about how the Web is changing the way the we read - and the way that we think. There was a tidbit about language in there that I found interesting (good thing I didn't skim past it!).

Reading... is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Part of the reason I want to learn to read Mandarin Chinese is to expand my mind, to enhance my ability to think and process visual input in the form of characters. This fascinates me, and drives me to use sites like nciku to amass large amounts of Chinese vocabulary (well, that's a ways off yet). I want to activate those other areas of the brain that will develop as I learn to interpret Chinese characters.

In fact, aside from being able to relate with more people all over the world, that is what has most interested me about learning languages in general: new ways of thinking about the same old sh!t. But are we really thinking more and more as we delve into technology, search engines, the Worldwide Web, et al? Or are we developing into mere processors of information that have lost the ability to think and concentrate profoundly on a topic for extended periods?

I certainly feel the restlessness bubble up inside of me when faced with a Web page full of text, and chances are I won't read it all, just find what I wanted and keep going. Good or bad - who knows? But watching myself change with the amazing flux of information available to me has caused me to revert back to the "old school" in several ways, most notably forcing (literally) myself to concentrate on learning a language non-sporadically - a whole hour devoted to one language! It has also caused me to back away from information overload... cancel loads of email subscriptions and unsubscribe from a bucketload of RSS feeds in an effort to be (over-)exposed to only the most pertinent, interesting content.

Now I feel my concentration waning as I write this lengthy entry! Better check out before you do.

One of my random theories on language learning concerns the Swadesh List, "one of several lists of vocabulary with "basic" meanings and developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1940-50s, which is used in lexicostatistics (quantitative language relatedness assessment) and glottochronology (language divergence dating)."

If this sounds like gobbledygook, that's OK. It kind of is, really. Basically, linguists use this list of words called the Swadesh List to study how closely related (or not) certain languages are to one another. They are able to "determine the approximate date of first separation of genetically related language(s)" and other such nifty things.

In regards to language learning, my theory (currently in a very early stage of extrapolation) is that people can learn all the words on the Swadesh List at an early stage of foreign language study to provide them with a very basic, low-level and frequently-used lexicon. This vocabulary will allow learners to express a large amount of thoughts and ideas using few words. This could be used hand-in-hand with action-oriented language learning, another underdeveloped language learning theory of mine which maintains that verbs are what "make things happen" in any language, and that with a small handful of core verbs, many things can be related in a given language.

Some of the verbs on the Swadesh List are high-frequency verbs, such as drink, eat, breathe, laugh, see, hear, know, think, smell, sleep, live, die, kill, fight, hit, cut, split, scratch, dig, swim, fly, walk, come, lie, sit, stand, turn, fall, give, hold, squeeze, rub, wash, wipe, pull, push, throw, tie, count, say, sing and play. With these verbs alone under your belt, there are a lot of useful actions that can be expressed.

For more information on the Swadesh List, check out Wiktionary's Swadesh List entry where you'll find the list in multiple languages on a nice chart.

More to come on action-oriented language learning and other such emerging theories of how to get the most out of time spent learning a foreign language.