Category: Wikimedia Foundation

This week, the Cleveland Museum of Art implemented a clear and permissive open access policy, removing all copyright restrictions on photographs of 30,000 items and releasing all metadata related to the 61,000 works in their collection. In short, this means that anyone, in any context, can access, reuse, and remix the collections. With this decision,….

From our beginning, Wikipedia has aspired to create a world where knowledge is free, accessible and useful to everyone, in every language, in every country, and across any device. Although the volunteers who make Wikipedia possible have made great strides towards achieving this vision, we’re still a long way from getting there. They say Rome….

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,….

We are pleased to announce that Facebook, one of the world’s leading social networking platforms, has given $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment—a permanent, independent fund dedicated to ensuring the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. “We launched the Endowment in 2016 as an unwavering commitment to the lasting power….

Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia community members in Jordan, and Hashemite University—one of the most esteemed higher education institutions in Jordan—signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to advance cultural cooperation and access to free knowledge resources in the Arabic language. It is the first MOU of its type signed with any university in the….

Today, Giving Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation begins its annual banner campaign on the English Wikipedia, inviting anyone who values Wikipedia to join us on our journey and support  its continued growth and evolution as the world’s free knowledge resource. Banners will appear on the English Wikipedia asking our readers to consider contributing to the site….

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….

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….

Today, we’re excited to announce that Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer and creator of such devices as the Kindle and Alexa, has made a $1 million gift to the Wikimedia Endowment, a permanent fund dedicated to ensuring the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Ever since its creation, Wikipedia….

Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation surveys the volunteer communities who edit Wikimedia sites for their input on a variety of topics that, in turn, help Foundation staff make decisions about how to support these communities. In April 2018, over 4,000 Wikimedia community members, answered up to 50 questions about their experiences working on the Wikimedia….