Category: Community

Donna Strickland is an optical physicist at the University of Waterloo. She is also the winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics (as of two days ago), a former president and fellow of the Optical Society, and early in her career was the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. What did she receive these honors….

Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia projects are massively multilingual on every level: Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages, and the technical platform that powers it supports even more than 300 languages (and includes sophisticated support for different languages’ grammar features). Nearly all of this work is done by volunteers from around the globe—volunteers….

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….

Wikimedia, especially Wikipedia, hasn’t always had the best of relationships with academia. So you may be surprised to learn that there’s a trio of Wikimedia academic journals that are now accepting submissions: the WikiJournal of Medicine, Science, and Humanities. All are run on a traditional academic journal model, including an extensive peer review process by….

Over the last few years, the annual Wikimedia Conference has seen many more individuals in emerging communities. This year, Wikimedians from 79 countries, representing nearly one hundred movement affiliates, contributed to the event’s cultural, regional, and language diversity. Community member Rupika Sharma interviewed several of these attendees to get their thoughts on the Wikimedia movement, their own communities,….

Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation surveys the volunteer communities who edit Wikimedia sites for their input on a variety of topics that, in turn, help Foundation staff make decisions about how to support these communities. In April 2018, over 4,000 Wikimedia community members, answered up to 50 questions about their experiences working on the Wikimedia….

#1Lib1Ref is an annual campaign where librarians and other contributors to Wikipedia add references to improve statements with the ultimate objective of improving the reliability of Wikipedia. In 2018, the Iberocoop Network participated in the #1lib1ref campaign (1bib1ref in Spanish) in Latin America. The campaign ran for three weeks in May 2018, to commemorate the….

You can read this post in the original Spanish on Wikimedia Mexico’s blog. Editatona, Wikimedia Mexico’s initiative to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, won the 2018 Premio del Fondo Regional para la Innovación Digital en América Latina y el Caribe (abbreviated FRIDA, and translated as “Award for the Regional Fund for Digital….

On 2 September, disaster struck the National Museum of Brazil: a massive fire devastated the building and its extensive holdings. Centuries of cultural heritage, including recordings of dead languages and ancient artifacts from pre-Columbian times, were lost. But amid the carnage and destruction, a movement has risen—one with the aim of adding as much knowledge….

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….