Wikipedia’s various language editions often carry entirely different content. Now one researcher has identified a small band of multilingual editors who are working to change that.

Wikipedia aims to provide free online access to all human knowledge. And a cursory look at its vital statistics appear to indicate that it’s well on its way to achieving that. The organisation has 77,000 active contributors working on over 22 million articles in 285 languages. All this attracts some 500 million unique visitors a month.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

One Doctor’s Legacy
The Wall Street Journal explores the history of psychosurgery.
—Antonio Regalado, senior editor, business

Cereal Killers

Jonathan Lawrence, Kindy Diallo, Suhail Sikka, Kamau Lillard

GSA annually funds more than 300 UMBC graduate students’ research and travel with an average of $140,000 expended. This graduate assistantship is the project manager for GSA Research & Travel (R&T) including upkeep of the R&T database, coordinating R&T processes, analyzing R&T data, and producing monthly, semester and annual reports which assist the GSA Executive Board’s strategic planning and budgeting processes.

This graduate assistantship requires knowledge of computer databases, website management, project management and systems processes. The position requires design, trouble-shooting, research, and analysis as well as the ability to work alone and on a team. Duties include database management and research on GSA R&T funding.

This position chairs the GSA Senate Travel & Research Committee, working in collaboration with GSA Senators and Executive Board members to create more efficient processes and effective reports. The GA will have a sense of project management to assist with events and long-term projects. The GA in this position should have a background in the following topics: database implementation, project management, decision technology, information management, emerging technologies.

Responsibilities: 65% database and R&T project management; 25% website management; 10% recruitment.

This is a 20-hour/week assistantship including tuition remission, stipend & GA health insurance. Stipends http://www.umbc.edu/gradschool/funding/minimum_stipend_levels.html

Send an application letter, CV, a copy of your UMBC unofficial transcripts, and contact information for 2-3 faculty/UMBC references to Dr. Jenness E. Hall hall@umbc.edu with the subject “R&T GA Position.”

Interviews will commence immediately. Position available January 6. 2014.

On October 28th, I tweeted that I was looking to hire a freelance front-end web developer for Uncover:

I’ve got a quick frontend freelance gig for someone. Please @ message me or email me if interested.

— Spencer Fry (@spencerfry) October 28, 2013

I thought I would give it a shot, now knowing what to expect. While I may have more Twitter followers than some (5,250+), I didn’t think I’d get more than a lead or two. What I definitely didn’t expect was to interview five competent people the next day: four over Skype and one in person in New York City.

Within minutes, I had several people reply to my tweet that they’d be interested in the job. I responded to them with my email address and we set up a chance to talk the following day. By the end of the day I had five scheduled meetings in my calendar for the following day. Two of the people were local in NYC, one was in the UK, one was in Belgium, and the fifth was in San Francisco. The following morning before I started the interviews I tweeted:

I'll have interviewed 5 frontend developers for a quick gig by the end of today. All thanks to intros via Twitter.

— Spencer Fry (@spencerfry) October 29, 2013

I was giddy at the thought that a single tweet could land me a freelancer.

The interviews proceeded on schedule and I talked to each of the candidates for between fifteen and twenty minutes. I emailed each of them three PNG files that represented the PSDs that needed to be converted into HTML and CSS. I then explained that Uncover is written in Ruby on Rails and asked what their experience was with implementing HTML/CSS in that environment. They all had experience with RoR. We also use a rather obscure views and templates engine called Mustache and I wanted to find out whether anyone had used it. One had heard of it, but nobody had used it. I then asked them a series of short questions to gauge their experience and to find out how they would complete the actual work. What was their process? Where would they start?

After interviewing all the candidates, I had a sense of who would be the best person for the job, but I needed to wait for quotes before making my decision. I gave each candidate until the following morning to get back to me with a quote. Only one of the five sent a proposal right after we’d talked. The quotes ranged from as little as $750 to as much as $1650 with the average being at just over $1,000. I could tell from speaking with the $750 person that he was the least experienced of the group. Four of the five quotes were hourly and one was project based. I ended up negotiating down the $1,650 guy, the one who had given the project based quote, to $1,200 after another Skype call with him.

I explained to him that $1,650 was $550 higher than the next highest quote, but that I’d be willing to pay a premium because of his experience and that he was located in New York. While I’m all for remote workers, I’m willing to pay slightly more knowing that we could grab coffee or meet briefly at our office if it was necessary. At this time, we haven’t needed to.

We signed the contract and began work the next day. Immediately after signing the contract, I reached out to the other four candidates and let them know that I appreciated their time but that I had gone with someone else. Everyone wrote back with nice emails. The worst thing you can do is to take your time making your decision when hiring someone as a freelancer, because it’s unfair to the people you don’t go with. They’re left waiting, not knowing what’s going to happen or whether their time has been booked.

Finding this freelancer through Twitter has been an amazing experience. I went from a single tweet asking for a freelance front-end developer to a signed contract in under 48 hours. I’ve hired dozens of freelancers, but nothing even close to that short a timeframe has ever happened to me before.

It’s amazing to see the value that being on Twitter can bring you. I would never have been able to find five developers to interview in such a short period of time in any other way. Emailing friends for recommendations would have required an email exchange. Posting on job boards would have cost money. Using Elance or oDesk would have been a pain in its own right. Only Twitter allowed me a direct one-to-one correspondence immediately with interested people whom I could quickly vet.

The post Hiring a Freelance Developer Via Twitter and Why This is So Powerful appeared first on Treehouse Blog.