Wikimedia:Sandbox
Our projects are the core of the Wikimedia movement. All major projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by users around the world using the MediaWiki software. All contributions are released under a free Creative Commons license, meaning that any project content may be freely used, edited, copied, and redistributed, subject to the terms of the license. A full listing of Wikimedia projects is available here: Special:SiteMatrix.
Please note: while other sites use the MediaWiki software (often giving them a similar visual appearance) or have a name that includes "Wiki-" or "-pedia", only the projects listed below are part of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikispecies
Template:Logo Wikispecies is an open, wiki-based project to provide a central, more extensive species database for taxonomy. Launched 14 September 2004, Wikispecies is aimed specifically at the needs of scientific users, and as of October 2010, has over 240,000 entries. There are plans to help Wikispecies collaborate with the Encyclopedia of Life project when the latter is more fully underway.
Wikinews
Template:Logo The Wikinews project was launched in December 2004 with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. Contributors from around the world write news articles collaboratively. Reports range from original reporting and interviews to summaries of news from external sources. All reports are required to be written from a neutral point of view.
Unlike other Wikimedia projects, Wikinews is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 rather than Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.
Currently Wikinews has two aims: providing a free content alternative to commercial news sites and making sure that articles are fact-checked and reviewed thoroughly.
Wikiversity
Template:Logo Wikiversity is a project dedicated to learning materials and learning communities, as well as research. It was set up as a Wikimedia project (in "beta" phase) on 15 August 2006 with the English and German Wikiversities, as well as the multilingual coordination hub. Despite what its name may suggest, Wikiversity is not limited to university (or tertiary) level materials, but is open to materials and communities of all learner levels. The way it can facilitate learning activities and communities is still being explored, but is centered around the model of 'learning by doing', or 'experiential learning'.
As of October 2010 there are over 30,000 learning resource entries across 12 languages. The English version contains over 13,000 and both French and German have over 2,000 entries.
Wikivoyage
Template:Logo Wikivoyage aims to create the world's largest free, complete and up-to-date world-wide travel guide. Wikivoyage was launched in January 2013 and is written by volunteers in the same spirit of sharing knowledge that makes travel so enjoyable. The project began in December 2006 as a German language fork of a site named Wikitravel, and joined the Wikimedia Foundation project family as a beta with 50,000 articles in seven languages. Wikivoyage is now available in nine languages.
Wikimedia Commons
Template:Logo Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004 to provide a central repository for free photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media. It is a multilingual project with contributors speaking dozens of languages, that serves as a central repository for all Wikimedia projects.
The project is growing rapidly. In December 2012, it reached fifteen million multimedia files, having surpassed 10 million in April of the previous year. Wikimedia Commons received an honorary mention for Digital Community at the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica awards.
The project has three community-driven mechanisms for highlighting quality contributions: Featured pictures which acknowledge the cream of the crop, and Quality images, which recognise well-composed creations by Wikimedia editors. Since 2006 it has run a Picture of the Year competition, which invites the wider Wikimedia community to share in the celebration of the inspiring free content imagery. Two pages, Meet our photographers and Meet our illustrators, showcase a selection of the highly skilled contributors who choose to use free content licenses and donate their work to the Wikimedia Commons.
For more information on Commons, please see Spotlight on Wikimedia Commons.
Wikidata
Template:Logo Wikidata was launched in October 2012 and aims to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It will provide data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects, and allow for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files. Wikidata is a new Wikimedia hosted and maintained project.
MediaWiki
Template:Logo The MediaWiki open source community maintains several software projects. The MediaWiki engine is used by all Wikimedia projects and many other sites. Its core functionality can be expanded through extensions, customizations, and mobile applications. Developers can use the MediaWiki API to build applications interacting with sites like Wikipedia. MediaWiki welcomes technical volunteers for development, testing, system administration, documentation, design, and promotion.