Category: Technology

The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the appointment of Grant Ingersoll as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Grant brings two decades of experience in open source software development and natural language processing engineering to the Foundation. He will join the Foundation on 23 September. The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and….

Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods. The attack is ongoing and our Site Reliability Engineering team is working hard to stop it and restore access to the site. As one of the world’s most popular sites, Wikipedia sometimes attracts “bad faith” actors.….

A galloping overview As we have done before, 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….

At Wikimedia, technical internships aren’t reserved just for new college grads seeking work experience at the beginning of their professional lives. We invite individuals of any age and at any stage of their careers to learn and collaborate with technical staff members and volunteers. Throughout the year, our Developer Advocacy team partners with established programs….

Yesterday, we were disappointed to learn that The North Face, an outdoor recreation product company, and Leo Burnett Tailor Made, an ad agency retained by The North Face, unethically manipulated Wikipedia. They have risked your trust in our mission for a short-lived marketing stunt. In a video about the campaign, Leo Burnett and The North….

Wikipedia is built and edited by the collaborative efforts of volunteers around the world. When it came time to improve the editing features on Wikipedia’s iOS app, we here on the Wikimedia Foundation’s iOS team wanted to ensure that our design process reflected that and the values of our organization, including our design principles. To….

One of the key mechanisms that allows Wikipedia to maintain its high quality is the use of inline citations. Through citations, readers and editors make sure that information in an article accurately reflects its source. As Wikipedia’s verifiability policy mandates, “material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a….

We’re excited to announce that we’re becoming a member of the W3C, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994, W3C works with hundreds of organizations to ensure that the web’s basic building blocks—like HTML or CSS—remain consistent across browsers, platforms, and more. You can learn more….

A galloping overview As we have done before, 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….

You may remember a time before password standards, when passwords like “password” were used. As countless news stories have shown us since, those passwords were not ideal—but the recommended solution of creating complex passwords for each website has created problems of its own.[1] Having one of your online accounts hacked can be a disruptive and….