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This may come as a surprise, but copyrighted works often cannot be used in educational and research materials. For example:  students in France, Italy, Luxembourg and Romania cannot legally quote an entire artwork in a digital presentation. In Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom a teacher may not send an email to….

In recent weeks, the world learned about Dr. Donna Strickland, only the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. It also learned that Wikipedia lacked an article on Strickland amongst its over five million articles. Wikipedia subsequently received justifiable criticism for its low percentage of female editors, its editing culture, and its….

The Wikimedia Foundation is honored to join the Global Network Initiative (GNI) as an observer, an opportunity we hope will advance our efforts to champion freedom of expression and privacy for the Wikimedia community and beyond. GNI is a channel for collective action, advocating to governments and international institutions for policies and laws which promote….

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….

Maybe you’ve already heard the story of how the global edit-a-thon known as Art+Feminism got started. It goes something like this: Five years ago, four friends—Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg, and Laurel Ptak—gathered together to discuss an idea for promoting Wikipedia as a place to challenge one of the ways women are silenced: through….

We are pleased to announce a $2 million gift to the Wikimedia Endowment from George Soros, one of the world’s leading philanthropists. Soros is known for his extensive philanthropy to support ideals underpinning a free and open society, including access to knowledge, education, economic development and policy reform. He is also known for founding the….

We’re always looking for ways to strengthen the open source ecosystem. Over the past two months, the Developer Advocacy team at the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated with two open source initiatives: Mozilla’s Open Source Student Network (OSSN) and TeachingOpenSource.org’s Professors’ Open Source Software Experience  (TOS and POSSE, respectively). OSSN is designed to bring more students into open….

The great potential of AI: Scaling wiki-work At Wikimedia, AIs help us support quality control work, task routing, and other critical infrastructures for maintaining Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis. To make it easier to support wiki-work with AIs, we built and maintain ORES, an open AI service that provides several types of machine predictions to….

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….