Category: Projects/Initiatives

A galloping overview As we have done before, let’s get a bird’s-eye view of the parts of the search process: text comes in and gets processed and stored in a database (called an index); a user submits a query; documents that match the query are retrieved from the index, ranked based on how well they….

Filipina American artist Dorothy Santos knows what it feels like to be a minority in your field. She said, “I thought, ‘there’s no one who looks like me in this industry!’ ” She reached out to Jennifer Wofford, co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area-based artist collaborative Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., and years later contributed to….

Wikimedia’s Developer Advocacy Team exists to support the staff and volunteer software developers and technologists who ensure that the free knowledge on Wikipedia and its sister projects is always available and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Developer Advocates work to grow the movement’s technical communities by coordinating participation in hackathons and technical outreach….

For many years, the Wikimedia Foundation’s vision statement has asked us to imagine how the world would be changed if every single person on Earth had access to the “sum of all knowledge”—but because Wikipedia is a web project, only those with internet access could reach that knowledge. That’s left billions behind. Anne Nelson, who….

The black-and-white film flickers as a wealthy young woman, sitting on a bench in a garden, bats her eyes at the gardener’s son she is not allowed to marry. In her self-portrait, an artist wears masculine clothes against a bleak urban backdrop, dark eyes meeting the viewer’s gaze from the shadow of a broad-brimmed riding….

That’s what a recent global brand study sought to research as part of the Wikimedia movement’s planning towards our ambitious 2030 strategic goals. The study was led by Wolff Olins, an international brand consultancy, and directed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Communications department. The results showed high support for Wikimedia’s mission and strong interest in contributing….

It was almost exactly five years ago that a reform of EU copyright was included in the European Commission’s list of priorities. The setting of that priority was followed by several public consultations, countless public events, and many face-to-face meetings. In 2016, the Commission made a proposal for what this reform would look like. Since….

“I’m editing the page for the star Proxima Centauri. It’s missing something about the planet Proxima b, so I should fix it”. These are the words of 12-year-old Michael—surprisingly confident for someone contributing to Wikipedia for the first time. “Have you found a reference for it?,” asked a Wikimedia volunteer editor, to which Michael replied with his….

2019 marks the fourth year of #1Lib1Ref, an annual campaign that asks everyone to jump in and improve Wikipedia by adding at least one citation. In doing so, they help improve the reliability and authenticity of the site for billions of readers. Though literally meaning “One Librarian, One Reference”, #1Lib1Ref has grown to include archivists,….

Studies estimate that there are more than 7,000 languages spoken around the world. Wikipedia exists in about 300 of them. That’s about 4 percent of some of the world’s languages documenting some of the world’s knowledge. Consider the Arabic language. With more than 420 million speakers, it’s one of the most widely spoken languages in….