Category: Technology

Rhizome, an arts organization in New York City, was one of the early adopters of Wikibase, having been using it since 2015 for its archive of born-digital art and digital preservation activities. Sandra Fauconnier interviewed Dragan Espenschied (Rhizome’s preservation director), Lyndsey Moulds (software curator), and Lozana Rossenova (external Ph.D. researcher) to ask them why and….

Fifteen students from India, Israel, and Cameroon contributed over fifty thousand lines of code to Wikimedia projects this past summer* under the mentorship and guidance of twenty-four mentors. Thirteen of those projects were conducted under the Google Summer of Code program, and one was managed under the Outreachy program.  In addition, one student completed a….

We are always looking for ways to connect with our audiences around the globe on the platforms that they use on a daily basis, and so we are excited to announce that Wikipedia is now on Line. We’re using it reach our audiences in Japan, which has one of the most-active Wikipedia communities in the….

The benefits of having a Wikipedia article about yourself or your business seem obvious—they rank highly in search engine results, and having one can make your online presence more “professional”. However, Wikipedia works in a very different way than the rest of the internet. An article is by no means guaranteed; it can seem really….

Let’s say you’re planning a trip to a subtropical region and you want to learn about available vaccines for yellow fever. You look up the English Wikipedia article. You’re lucky to find a well-sourced section, with a wealth of references, many of them pointing to information from public health agencies and reputable news articles. Great!….

Last year, we released the EventStreams service. This service allows anyone to subscribe to recent changes to Wikimedia data. At the time, we only had one stream of data available: RecentChanges. RecentChanges is a stream of Wikimedia change events (e.g. recent edits to pages in Japanese Wikipedia). External developers can consume this stream to create tools or….

A galloping overview To start, 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 match the query,….

Last year, the data visualization website The Pudding mapped out Miles Davis’ legacy by sorting through every Wikipedia page that mentioned the jazz legend. It was just one of dozens of visualizations that have been built on Wikipedia data over the past decade. This week, The Pudding released a new visualization that examines Wikipedia pageview increases….

There are villages in the Ecuadorian Andes that are so small you cannot find them on a map. Cajas Juridica is one such place, located just 13km north of the equator. But two engineering students, Joshua Salazar and Jorge Vega, and the staff of Yachay Tech University have figured out a way to give discarded….

The new interaction timeline tool is a way to look at two contributors’ editing history—where they have interacted, when, and how often. This can help add clarity when reviewing reports of harassment and abuse, and takes some of the burden off both the people reviewing problems, and the people reporting them.