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….

Writing about Islam in Hebrew: Dar AsSalam Editors Last January, Wikimedia communities around the world celebrated Wikipedia’s seventeenth birthday—and Wikimedia Israel joined in. Held at the IBM office in Tel Aviv, nearly 60 Wikimedians attended, including a group of Palestinian editors from the Dar AsSalam Islamic Center (meaning House of Peace) in Kafr Qara, Haifa….

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 AI’s, 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….

Sophia Fairweather is eight years old. She’s an inventor, a startup creator, a mentor, and a proud champion of women in STEM-related fields. She’s also a big advocate of Wikipedia and getting more people to edit the free encyclopedia. Sophia recently asked on LinkedIn and tweeted about an editing initiative she was launching throughout Canada….

Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia projects are massively multilingual on every level: Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages, and the technical platform that powers it supports even more than 300 languages (and includes sophisticated support for different languages’ grammar features). Nearly all of this work is done by volunteers from around the globe—volunteers….