Category: Community

The Smithsonian—one of the leading museums and research centers in the United States—has added over 200 images of women involved in the battle for women’s suffrage in the country to Wikimedia Commons, one of the world’s largest collections of freely licensed media. The donation helps advance the Smithsonian’s strategic plan, which calls for reaching one….

The original Beetle, constructed by the German automaker Volkswagen, was in production from 1938 until 2003. Convertible Beetles were usually nicer than their roofed counterparts. According to Wikipedia, the Beetle convertible was “generally more lavishly equipped than the sedan with dual rear ashtrays, twin map pockets, a visor vanity mirror on the passenger side, rear….

Have you ever tried zooming in on an image on your computer? Did you notice how the quality steadily got worse and worse? This is an unfortunate feature of “raster graphics,” the file formats that use a rectangular grid of pixels to make up an image, and present a particular problem for people making maps,….

The Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse is located in Hjørring, Jutland, Denmark, on the North Sea. Construction on it began in 1899; it was lit for the first time in 1900 and its light was extinguished for the final time in 1968. Today, the lighthouse is threatened by heavy coastal erosion in the area, which are bringing….

Imagine a world where you grew up in a world where the greatest literary works in history never existed. For many of the world’s language speakers, this can be their functional reality. Titles like these have either never been translated, or were translated decades ago and now hide in ancient paper-bound texts on dusty library….

A long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) in Labuk Bay, Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia. According to Wikipedia, the long-tailed macaque is native to Southeast Asia. Its social groups are controlled by females, and any male children depart after undergoing puberty. While this macaque “has a long history alongside humans[,] they have been alternately seen as agricultural pests, sacred….

How do we make knowledge creation truly participatory for every community on our planet? The Wikimedia movement has been growing steadily, with more volunteers joining, and new affiliate groups created every year. Affiliates represent our movement at the local level and are charged with organizing activities and events to get people and organizations involved in….

The annual conference behind Wikipedia, one of the world’s most visited and beloved websites, will take place in Stockholm from 14–18 August 2019. The event will bring together members of the global community behind Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects: volunteer editors (Wikimedians) from around the world, museum and archival experts, leaders of….

The annual Wikimedia Hackathon brings people with different skillsets together to improve the software that powers Wikimedia websites. This edition took place at the Prague National Library of Technology and provided an opportunity for volunteer technologists to meet in person, share ideas, have fun, and work together to improve the software that Wikipedia and its….

Four years ago, Ismael Andani Abdulai was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, working towards a master’s in law. One of the required courses for that degree was on cyber law, focusing on legal issues related to computers, the internet, and information technology. Appropriately, the professor in charge of the class assigned….