Category: Technology

Wikipedia is built and edited by the collaborative efforts of volunteers around the world. When it came time to improve the editing features on Wikipedia’s iOS app, we here on the Wikimedia Foundation’s iOS team wanted to ensure that our design process reflected that and the values of our organization, including our design principles. To….

Earlier this month, a group of dedicated MediaWiki administrators, contractors, and users met in Daly City, California, United States for the annual Enterprise MediaWiki Conference (EMWCon for short). MediaWiki is the main underlying software that makes Wikipedia possible, but its use cases range far beyond that of the encyclopedia. It is a critical technology for….

We’re excited to announce that we’re becoming a member of the W3C, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994, W3C works with hundreds of organizations to ensure that the web’s basic building blocks—like HTML or CSS—remain consistent across browsers, platforms, and more. You can learn more….

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….

You may remember a time before password standards, when passwords like “password” were used. As countless news stories have shown us since, those passwords were not ideal—but the recommended solution of creating complex passwords for each website has created problems of its own.[1] Having one of your online accounts hacked can be a disruptive and….

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….

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that supports the free knowledge platform Wikipedia, today announces that Victoria Coleman has stepped down from her role as Chief Technology Officer. “Victoria joined us two years ago with the mandate to expand our system redundancies and refine our approach to technical program operations. I appreciate all her contributions and….

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….

Languages and multilinguality have always been an important part of the Wikimedia projects. After all, Wikimedia projects are available in over 300 languages. But most of these languages are accessible as a form of knowledge of their own only in their written form. Lingua Libre aims to change that by making the sound of a….

With over five million articles, finding the exact Wikipedia article you want can sometimes feel like you’re searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. That’s why if you go and search the world’s largest encyclopedia, you will see a new interface that provides several common search terms. No longer will people looking for their….