Category: Community

A lonely monastery. The sun rising over the desert. A walk through a national park. These are just a few of the spectacular sights captured in the winners of the international Wiki Loves Earth photography competition, announced today. Coming in first place, seen at top, is a shot of the famed columnar basalt of Cape Stolbchaty, located in Russia’s….

Languages and multilinguality have always been an important part of the Wikimedia projects. After all, Wikimedia projects are available in over 300 languages. But most of these languages are accessible as a form of knowledge of their own only in their written form. Lingua Libre aims to change that by making the sound of a….

With over five million articles, finding the exact Wikipedia article you want can sometimes feel like you’re searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. That’s why if you go and search the world’s largest encyclopedia, you will see a new interface that provides several common search terms. No longer will people looking for their….

Have you ever heard of compulsory heterosexuality? This concept described how heterosexuality is assumed, enforced and viewed as an obligation regardless of one’s own sexual preferences, and it was the subject of one of the articles that members of the LGBT user group wrote about in different languages in Stockholm, Sweden, last August. The event….

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….

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….

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….

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….

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….

Wikimedia, especially Wikipedia, hasn’t always had the best of relationships with academia. So you may be surprised to learn that there’s a trio of Wikimedia academic journals that are now accepting submissions: the WikiJournal of Medicine, Science, and Humanities. All are run on a traditional academic journal model, including an extensive peer review process by….