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….
This eight-year-old is inspiring others to edit Wikipedia
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….
On International Translation Day, we celebrate Wikimedia’s volunteer translators
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….
You can trial content translation (version two!) right now
On International Translation Day, we are opening up early access to version two of the content translation tool, which simplifies the process of translating Wikipedia articles for Wikimedia’s volunteer translators. First released in January 2015, more than 350,000 Wikipedia articles have been created using the tool. Content translation’s second version, previewed last April, is a….
Exploring offline access to Wikipedia: Dr. Samuel Zidovetzki on Wikipedia’s role in rural health initiatives
Senior Program Manager Anne Gomez leads the New Readers initiative, where she works on ways to better understand barriers that prevent people around the world from accessing information online. One of her areas of interest is offline access, as she works with the New Readers team to improve the way people who have limited or infrequent access to….
Amazon makes $1 million gift to support the future of free knowledge
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….
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