Wikimedia Highlights, February 2016

Here are highlights from across the Wikimedia movement, as reported on this blog in February 2016: Recording romanticism and filling Wikimedia Commons with 19th century music; What’s TPP? The problematic partnership; #BlackLifeMatters edit-a-thon bolsters Wikipedia’s coverage of black history.

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It "revolutionized the way German-speaking people inform themselves about the world": Fifteen years of the German Wikipedia

It's been so revolutionary that it has even become the de facto replacement for the Brockhaus—the German equivalent of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

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Wikipedia’s coverage of essential vaccines is expanding

The Medical Translation Task Force has boosted its productivity by 17% and increased the amount of health care content by using the content translation tool. Rather than handing out a Microsoft Word document full of Wikimedia markup for translation, translators are being coached on how to use the content translation tool. As a new process, this….

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Pick and choose and Pikachu: 20 years after Pokémon launched, its impact on Wikipedia remains

Years ago, the English Wikipedia was being overrun by a deluge of articles on Pokémon characters and creatures.

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Millions read Bowie biography following sudden death

On January 10, just two days after the release of his twenty-sixth studio album, enigmatic British artist David Bowie died following an eighteen-month battle with liver cancer. His death kicked off a string of deaths among aging male entertainers, including Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey, René Angélil, and Abe Vigoda—all but the last within six years of age from one another. All….

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What are the most-edited articles through Wikipedia’s history?

The data will surprise you: Spears near Hitler, creationism alongside feminism, wrestling versus Jesus, and more.

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Wikipedia statistics show that 2015 was the year of the movie

2015 was the year of the movie on Wikipedia, with eight film-related articles in the top 25—and one climbing all the way up to No. 3 in the last two months of the year.

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Top 20 most-edited pages on Wikipedia in 2015

Death, pop culture, current events ... and one person writing about the Juneau Icefield.

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Wikimedia IEG program will fund fourteen community-led projects

We are excited to announce the successful grantees from round two of the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2015 Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) program. Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) provide funding to individuals and small teams to take on projects with potential for online impact and that advance the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission and strategic priorities. These projects can take….

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Artificial intelligence service “ORES” gives Wikipedians X-ray specs to see through bad edits

When anyone can edit any page of one of the biggest websites in the world, how can you evaluate all those changes? A Wikimedia Foundation research scientist and a team of volunteers has developed an artificial intelligence service to handle some of the highest-volume crowdsourcing issues on the internet.

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