How Wikimedia helped mobile web readers save on data
Photos are a ubiquitous element of Wikipedia's most popular and highest quality articles, and this change means that your phone will only load images as you scroll down a page, rather than on opening a page.
Individual Engagement Grants program will fund eight community-led projects
Selected from a field of 28 applicants, the 8 focus on tools and online community organizing.
Wikimedia IEG program will fund fourteen community-led projects
We are excited to announce the successful grantees from round two of the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2015 Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) program. Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) provide funding to individuals and small teams to take on projects with potential for online impact and that advance the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission and strategic priorities. These projects can take….
Artificial intelligence service “ORES” gives Wikipedians X-ray specs to see through bad edits
When anyone can edit any page of one of the biggest websites in the world, how can you evaluate all those changes? A Wikimedia Foundation research scientist and a team of volunteers has developed an artificial intelligence service to handle some of the highest-volume crowdsourcing issues on the internet.
How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast
The creator of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, wanted to make it fast and easy to edit web pages. Cunningham named his software after a Hawaiian word for “quick.” That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation is happy to report that editing Wikipedia is now twice as quick. Over the last six months we deployed a new technology that speeds up MediaWiki, Wikipedia’s underlying PHP-based code. HipHop Virtual Machine, or HHVM, reduces [...]
Using Licenses in an easy (and legal) way
[...] “Open Content – A Practical Guide to Using Creative Commons Licences” is a publication by the German Commission for UNESCO, the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre and Wikimedia Deutschland. [...]
A behind the scenes look at the Wikimedia Foundation’s emergency response system
When my work phone rings in the middle of the night, I don’t ever have to wonder what it is. As one of the team of five who are charged with addressing emails sent to the Wikimedia Foundation’s emergency address, I sleep lightly on nights when I’m on call. [...]
Wikipedia Shows the Value of a Vibrant Public Domain
This post is part of Copyright Week held by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations in January 2014. While more commonly known as New Year’s Day, January 1 is also international Public Domain Day. It celebrates the day when creative works (such as books, images and songs) enter the public domain, which is the collective wealth of….
"Tech News": Fighting technical information overload for Wikimedians
Every week, tech ambassadors assemble, simplify and translate "Tech News," a curated newsletter then delivered to hundreds of subscribers across wikis. But how exactly did this start, how does it work behind the scenes, and how does it fit within our efforts to bring developers and users closer together?
