How many Wikipedia references are available to read? We measured the proportion of open access sources across languages and topics.
Let’s say you’re planning a trip to a subtropical region and you want to learn about available vaccines for yellow fever. You look up the English Wikipedia article. You’re lucky to find a well-sourced section, with a wealth of references, many of them pointing to information from public health agencies and reputable news articles. Great!….
How impactful are our grants? We’re investigating.
For almost a decade, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Resources team has been funding people and organizations pursuing our vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. In the last five years alone, we’ve given out over 35 million US dollars across almost 80 countries. Our efforts….
Understanding workflows of Wikimedia editors
Wikipedia exists because of a vast army of people who work alone and in concert. The amazing work of these volunteer editors in making Wikipedia is a complex world of interactions, processes, and activities. They range across the whole work of donating content, including editing, fixing things, adding media, and many other ways. Collectively, these….
Wikimedia to Senate: Don’t weaken the public domain
In an attempt to harmonize copyrights for the use of sound recordings created before 1972, the U.S. Senate is currently poised to pass a bill which could endanger the preservation and sharing of historical sound recordings online. The Music Modernization Act (MMA), which was passed in the House of Representatives in April and recently received….
EventStreams updates: You can now find new events, composite streams, and historical timestamp subscription
Last year, we released the EventStreams service. This service allows anyone to subscribe to recent changes to Wikimedia data. At the time, we only had one stream of data available: RecentChanges. RecentChanges is a stream of Wikimedia change events (e.g. recent edits to pages in Japanese Wikipedia). External developers can consume this stream to create tools or….
The anatomy of search: A token of my affection
A galloping overview To start, let’s get a bird’s-eye view of the parts of the search process: text comes in and gets processed and stored in a database (called an index); a user submits a query; documents that match the query are retrieved from the index, ranked based on how well they match the query,….
A new visualization uses Wikipedia pageview data to map celebrity deaths
Last year, the data visualization website The Pudding mapped out Miles Davis’ legacy by sorting through every Wikipedia page that mentioned the jazz legend. It was just one of dozens of visualizations that have been built on Wikipedia data over the past decade. This week, The Pudding released a new visualization that examines Wikipedia pageview increases….
Wikimedia panelists tackle the future of intermediary liability
When should companies that run websites be required to delete what you post online? At Wikimedia’s 11 July summer legal fellow panel, “The Future of Intermediary Liability,” legal scholars and practitioners discussed the rules for when and how online platforms are held legally responsible for what their users contribute. Under Section 230 of the 1996….
Wikimedia joins Partnership on AI to promote more equitable use of intelligent systems
The Wikimedia Foundation has joined the Partnership on AI, an organization that brings together academics, researchers, civil society organizations, companies building and utilizing AI technology, and other groups working to better understand AI’s impacts. The Partnership on AI brings together both commercial and nonprofit organizations to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies. Their….
‘Unfrogettable’ picture of the year announced
Whichever frog pun (or caption) you choose to label it with, the photo above is this year’s Wikimedia Commons picture of the year. It features two Phyllomedusa rohdei, frogs endemic to Brazil, with one stepping on the other’s head, seemingly reaching for something just out of the frame. The photo was taken by biologist Renato Augusto….
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