Category: Community

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….

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….

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….

“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….

This week, the Cleveland Museum of Art implemented a clear and permissive open access policy, removing all copyright restrictions on photographs of 30,000 items and releasing all metadata related to the 61,000 works in their collection. In short, this means that anyone, in any context, can access, reuse, and remix the collections. With this decision,….

2019 marks the fourth year of #1Lib1Ref, an annual campaign that asks everyone to jump in and improve Wikipedia by adding at least one citation. In doing so, they help improve the reliability and authenticity of the site for billions of readers. Though literally meaning “One Librarian, One Reference”, #1Lib1Ref has grown to include archivists,….

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….

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….