Category: Projects/Initiatives

When you think about the work of art historians or genetics researchers, installing database software is not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet, from 19 to 21 September, Wikimedians, art curators, and scientists gathered at the New Museum in New York City’s Lower East Side for a three-day workshop to talk about an….

The news that optical physicist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel Prize in Physics brought renewed attention to Women in Red, a long-standing volunteer effort to add more biographies about women to the encyclopedia. After the announcement, the Women in Red WikiProject had one of their best weeks ever,….

This post ran in the Los Angeles Times on 18 October 2018. When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring. To use Wikipedia parlance, she is very….

Donna Strickland is an optical physicist at the University of Waterloo. She is also the winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics (as of two days ago), a former president and fellow of the Optical Society, and early in her career was the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. What did she receive these honors….

Sophia Fairweather is eight years old. She’s an inventor, a startup creator, a mentor, and a proud champion of women in STEM-related fields. She’s also a big advocate of Wikipedia and getting more people to edit the free encyclopedia. Sophia recently asked on LinkedIn and tweeted about an editing initiative she was launching throughout Canada….

Senior Program Manager Anne Gomez leads the New Readers initiative, where she works on ways to better understand barriers that prevent people around the world from accessing information online. One of her areas of interest is offline access, as she works with the New Readers team to improve the way people who have limited or infrequent access to….

Wikimedia, especially Wikipedia, hasn’t always had the best of relationships with academia. So you may be surprised to learn that there’s a trio of Wikimedia academic journals that are now accepting submissions: the WikiJournal of Medicine, Science, and Humanities. All are run on a traditional academic journal model, including an extensive peer review process by….

On 2 September, disaster struck the National Museum of Brazil: a massive fire devastated the building and its extensive holdings. Centuries of cultural heritage, including recordings of dead languages and ancient artifacts from pre-Columbian times, were lost. But amid the carnage and destruction, a movement has risen—one with the aim of adding as much knowledge….

Last May, Prince Harry, fifth in line to the British throne, married Meghan Markle, an American actress and activist. The event captivated millions upon millions of people for several weeks, and many of them journeyed to Wikipedia to read the encyclopedia’s curated content about the British monarchy, the wedding plans, and the people involved. Unfortunately,….

Rhizome, an arts organization in New York City, was one of the early adopters of Wikibase, having been using it since 2015 for its archive of born-digital art and digital preservation activities. Sandra Fauconnier interviewed Dragan Espenschied (Rhizome’s preservation director), Lyndsey Moulds (software curator), and Lozana Rossenova (external Ph.D. researcher) to ask them why and….