Category: Interview

New features on Wikipedia are making it easy for everyone to edit Wikipedia, especially those contributing to the site for the first time. Every time you read a Wikipedia article, you are reading the work of a volunteer contributor.  Nearly 300,000 people from around the world edit Wikipedia articles each month — they start new….

Five years ago, Manavpreet Kaur administered several tests for entry-level forensics diploma students at Punjabi University, located in Patiala, Punjab, India. From her vantage point, Kaur—who had recently completed a Ph.D. in forensic science—quickly realized that not all of the students were comfortable with the course being taught exclusively in English. She searched for Punjabi-language….

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….

Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation asked designer George Oates, who has worked for Flickr and the Internet Archive‘s Open Library, among others, to conduct a deep dive into Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository that provides many of the images used on Wikipedia. We wanted a fresh pair of eyeballs, and we were particularly….

Last May, Prince Harry, fifth in line to the British throne, married Meghan Markle, an American actress and activist. The event captivated millions upon millions of people for several weeks, and many of them journeyed to Wikipedia to read the encyclopedia’s curated content about the British monarchy, the wedding plans, and the people involved. Unfortunately,….

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….

By day, Dr. Jess Wade is a physicist best known for her work on “polymer-based, circularly polarising, light-emitting diodes.” But in the evenings (and on the weekends, and as other time permits) Dr. Wade is a strong advocate for increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM subjects, speaking at conferences and starting a campaign on Wikipedia to promote more early-career women….

Did you know that humans make the right guess about 72% of the time, and that indicates that they have an intuition for this task, while also highlighting that the task is far from trivial?

Holding workshops in person is challenging, but holding workshops for people in multiple locations is even more so. Design Researcher Abbey Ripstra and Grace Gellerman, the Manager of Program Management, explain how they approached holding a series of remote-accessible meetings.

Luc Héripret leads the Orange Foundation's work in Africa.