Category: Community

Wikimedia Commons, the repository for educational media content that hosts most of the images used on Wikipedia, has announced its photo of the year.* Nearly 3,500 people chose between 57 images in the final round of the competition. Jason Weingart’s Evolution—a composite timelapse showing the development and frightening expansion of a tornado—took the top prize.….

Wikipedia’s article on the culture of India notes that the country contains “thousands of distinct and unique … languages, religion [and] customs [that] differ from place to place within the country.” To bring the vast knowledge of these many differing cultures to the world requires volunteers who both understand individual languages, religions and cultures of….

Wikimania 2019 will take place on 14–18 August at Stockholm University. Hosted by Wikimedia Sweden, the conference will bring together leaders within free knowledge spaces across the world for five days of pioneering discussions on the role of Wikimedia and free knowledge in fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations in….

For many years, the Wikimedia Foundation’s vision statement has asked us to imagine how the world would be changed if every single person on Earth had access to the “sum of all knowledge”—but because Wikipedia is a web project, only those with internet access could reach that knowledge. That’s left billions behind. Anne Nelson, who….

With a new name and a strategy-focused aim, the Wikimedia Summit (formerly known as the Wikimedia Conference) kicks off next month. Around 200 participants from Wikimedia affiliates, the Wikimedia Foundation, and various committees will head to Berlin from 29–31 March to discuss the future of the Wikimedia movement. The finalized schedule will be published in….

The black-and-white film flickers as a wealthy young woman, sitting on a bench in a garden, bats her eyes at the gardener’s son she is not allowed to marry. In her self-portrait, an artist wears masculine clothes against a bleak urban backdrop, dark eyes meeting the viewer’s gaze from the shadow of a broad-brimmed riding….

“I’m editing the page for the star Proxima Centauri. It’s missing something about the planet Proxima b, so I should fix it”. These are the words of 12-year-old Michael—surprisingly confident for someone contributing to Wikipedia for the first time. “Have you found a reference for it?,” asked a Wikimedia volunteer editor, to which Michael replied with his….

The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the appointment of Valerie D’Costa as Chief of Community Engagement. Valerie joins the Foundation after a decade at the World Bank Group, including nine years as leader of InfoDev, an initiative to facilitate sustainable development through access to data and information. Altogether, Valerie brings more than 25 years….

As 2018 turned to 2019, people around the world celebrated the start of a brand new year with parties, family, and friends. The transition into 2019 also marked a new era for access to knowledge and culture in the United States, as new works finally entered the public domain through copyright expiration for the first….

Alireza Akhlaghi had plenty of time inside the famed Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Iran to capture the photo that leads this blog post. Why? He walked in at exactly noon, just as the building was about to close down for two hours. He was able to convince the mosque’s guards to let him inside anyway, even though….