Category: Topics

The Wikimedia vision is a world in which every single person can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe knowledge belongs to everyone, and that people from diverse backgrounds should be empowered to participate in the collaborative creation of knowledge. While we often discuss diversity and inclusion in the context of the….

Imagine you are a teacher at a public school, and you want to use a free recording of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in your classroom. As an author of music textbooks and a music theory professor, I am always looking for creative ways to develop teaching materials as Open Educational Resources (oer-musik.de), so that everyone can….

Fifteen students from India, Israel, and Cameroon contributed over fifty thousand lines of code to Wikimedia projects this past summer* under the mentorship and guidance of twenty-four mentors. Thirteen of those projects were conducted under the Google Summer of Code program, and one was managed under the Outreachy program.  In addition, one student completed a….

One key to Wikipedia’s high quality is a system of mutual checks, based on the fact that every version of every page is stored and accessible. Thousands of community members review the latest edits of others in order to find errors or inconsistencies, comparing each new version of a page to older page versions and….

It has been some time since we last provided an update on Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA, our legal challenge to the United States National Security Agency’s “Upstream” mass surveillance practices. As you may recall, after we brought the suit in 2015, the government argued that the Foundation’s claims weren’t “plausible” because the NSA hadn’t admitted….

Let’s say you’re planning a trip to a subtropical region and you want to learn about available vaccines for yellow fever. You look up the English Wikipedia article. You’re lucky to find a well-sourced section, with a wealth of references, many of them pointing to information from public health agencies and reputable news articles. Great!….

For almost a decade, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Resources team has been funding people and organizations pursuing our vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. In the last five years alone, we’ve given out over 35 million US dollars across almost 80 countries. Our efforts….

Wikipedia exists because of a vast army of people who work alone and in concert. The amazing work of these volunteer editors in making Wikipedia is a complex world of interactions, processes, and activities. They range across the whole work of donating content, including editing, fixing things, adding media, and many other ways. Collectively, these….

In an attempt to harmonize copyrights for the use of sound recordings created before 1972, the U.S. Senate is currently poised to pass a bill which could endanger the preservation and sharing of historical sound recordings online. The Music Modernization Act (MMA), which was passed in the House of Representatives in April and recently received….

Last year, we released the EventStreams service. This service allows anyone to subscribe to recent changes to Wikimedia data. At the time, we only had one stream of data available: RecentChanges. RecentChanges is a stream of Wikimedia change events (e.g. recent edits to pages in Japanese Wikipedia). External developers can consume this stream to create tools or….