Wikimedia Foundation announces Lisa Lewin as new Trustee
Lisa Lewin, Managing Partner at Ethical Ventures, a New York City based management consulting firm, will be the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees oversees the Wikimedia Foundation and its work, and serves as the organization’s ultimate corporate authority. As an incoming trustee, Lisa will serve….
WikiAfrica Education initiative teaches South African students to decolonise the internet with Wikipedia
“I’m editing the page for the star Proxima Centauri. It’s missing something about the planet Proxima b, so I should fix it”. These are the words of 12-year-old Michael—surprisingly confident for someone contributing to Wikipedia for the first time. “Have you found a reference for it?,” asked a Wikimedia volunteer editor, to which Michael replied with his….
Wikimedia Foundation appoints Valerie D’Costa as Chief of Community Engagement
The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the appointment of Valerie D’Costa as Chief of Community Engagement. Valerie joins the Foundation after a decade at the World Bank Group, including nine years as leader of InfoDev, an initiative to facilitate sustainable development through access to data and information. Altogether, Valerie brings more than 25 years….
Our favorite weird and the wonderful images from the grand re-opening of the public domain
It’s been just over three weeks since the public domain started growing again in the United States, and works from 1923 became available for anyone to freely share, remix, and enjoy.[1] Since January, hundreds of files from 1923 have been uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons, including books, images, movies, and music. It would be impossible to showcase….
We applaud the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new open-access policy—and here’s what remains to be done.
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,….
Google and Wikimedia Foundation partner to increase knowledge equity online
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….
Through #1Lib1Ref, we ask that you give the gift of a citation
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,….
You can now use Google Translate to translate articles on Wikipedia
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….
Here’s why we’re celebrating the public domain in 2019
As 2018 turned to 2019, people around the world celebrated the start of a brand new year with parties, family, and friends. The transition into 2019 also marked a new era for access to knowledge and culture in the United States, as new works finally entered the public domain through copyright expiration for the first….
Wikipedia’s most-popular articles of 2018 show that pop culture rules over us all
People visited Wikipedia over 190 billion times in 2018 alone, many motivated by the encyclopedia’s wealth of in-depth articles about topics you didn’t know enough about. But in looking at the English Wikipedia’s most-popular articles of 2018, it’s clear that one motivation reigned supreme. People wanted to keep up with the popular culture moments happening….
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