How could Wikimedia Commons be improved? A conversation with designer George Oates
Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation asked designer George Oates, who has worked for Flickr and the Internet Archive‘s Open Library, among others, to conduct a deep dive into Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository that provides many of the images used on Wikipedia. We wanted a fresh pair of eyeballs, and we were particularly….
WikibaseNYC conference explores the frontier of linked open data infrastructure
When you think about the work of art historians or genetics researchers, installing database software is not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet, from 19 to 21 September, Wikimedians, art curators, and scientists gathered at the New Museum in New York City’s Lower East Side for a three-day workshop to talk about an….
Women in Red is changing Wikipedia’s coverage of women, one article at a time
The news that optical physicist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel Prize in Physics brought renewed attention to Women in Red, a long-standing volunteer effort to add more biographies about women to the encyclopedia. After the announcement, the Women in Red WikiProject had one of their best weeks ever,….
Wikipedia is a mirror of the world’s gender biases
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….
Look at all we’ve accomplished: The fifth year of Art+Feminism
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….
George Soros, founder of Open Society Foundations, invests in the future of free and open knowledge
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….
Wikimedia Foundation collaborates with two initiatives: Mozilla’s OSSN and TeachingOpenSource’s POSSE
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….
Community digest: Writing about Islam in Hebrew; GLAM activity kicks off in Indonesia; news in brief
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….
Mitigating biases in artificial intelligences—the Wikipedian way
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….
Why didn’t Wikipedia have an article on Donna Strickland, winner of a Nobel Prize?
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….
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