Category: Technology

Wikimedia’s Developer Advocacy Team exists to support the staff and volunteer software developers and technologists who ensure that the free knowledge on Wikipedia and its sister projects is always available and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Developer Advocates work to grow the movement’s technical communities by coordinating participation in hackathons and technical outreach….

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that supports the free knowledge platform Wikipedia, today announces that Victoria Coleman has stepped down from her role as Chief Technology Officer. “Victoria joined us two years ago with the mandate to expand our system redundancies and refine our approach to technical program operations. I appreciate all her contributions and….

Studies estimate that there are more than 7,000 languages spoken around the world. Wikipedia exists in about 300 of them. That’s about 4 percent of some of the world’s languages documenting some of the world’s knowledge. Consider the Arabic language. With more than 420 million speakers, it’s one of the most widely spoken languages in….

In Eritrea or Cuba, people routinely buy Wikipedia for one dollar.[1] Wait, what? Isn’t Wikipedia free? Of course it is—Wikipedia, in fact, is entirely free and very easy to reach if you are not one of four billion people who still do not have internet connectivity. If you are, however, having problems to access your….

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….

We’re always looking for ways to strengthen the open source ecosystem. Over the past two months, the Developer Advocacy team at the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated with two open source initiatives: Mozilla’s Open Source Student Network (OSSN) and TeachingOpenSource.org’s Professors’ Open Source Software Experience  (TOS and POSSE, respectively). OSSN is designed to bring more students into open….

On International Translation Day, we are opening up early access to version two of the content translation tool, which simplifies the process of translating Wikipedia articles for Wikimedia’s volunteer translators. First released in January 2015, more than 350,000 Wikipedia articles have been created using the tool. Content translation’s second version, previewed last April, is a….

Senior Program Manager Anne Gomez leads the New Readers initiative, where she works on ways to better understand barriers that prevent people around the world from accessing information online. One of her areas of interest is offline access, as she works with the New Readers team to improve the way people who have limited or infrequent access to….

A galloping overview Let’s first 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 match the query, and….

There are a lot of Wikimedia wikis. Wikipedia is the best-known of them all, but there’s also Commons, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wiktionary, and more. Also, each of these sites is available in multiple languages. Wikipedia, for example, has nearly 300 language editions. The newest launched just this week. Until this month, each wiki and language version….