New Wikipedia app for iOS puts the joy of exploration in your hand
Our new Wikipedia app for iOS features major design and usability improvements, including the new Explore feed.
What are the most-edited articles through Wikipedia’s history?
The data will surprise you: Spears near Hitler, creationism alongside feminism, wrestling versus Jesus, and more.
Artificial intelligence service “ORES” gives Wikipedians X-ray specs to see through bad edits
When anyone can edit any page of one of the biggest websites in the world, how can you evaluate all those changes? A Wikimedia Foundation research scientist and a team of volunteers has developed an artificial intelligence service to handle some of the highest-volume crowdsourcing issues on the internet.
Should I pay for a Wikipedia article?
At the end of August, volunteer editors on the English Wikipedia blocked 381 user accounts for so-called “black hat” editing—or more specifically, undisclosed paid advocacy. As the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog post defined it, undisclosed paid advocacy is “the practice of accepting or charging money to promote external interests on Wikipedia without revealing their affiliation, in violation of….
Hundreds of “black hat” English Wikipedia accounts blocked following investigation
After weeks of investigation, volunteer editors on English Wikipedia announced today that they blocked 381 user accounts for undisclosed paid advocacy.
Despite headlines, frequent edits don’t cause inaccuracy
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit. It didn’t surprise us to learn that articles considered to be controversial are frequently edited.
My life as an autistic Wikipedian
Two years ago, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum. As I learned more about myself and the way my brain worked, I started to look at past experiences through the lens of this newly-found aspect. In this essay, I share some of what I’ve learned along the way about my successes, my failures, and many things that confused me in the past, notably in my experiences in the Wikimedia movement.
Securing access to Wikimedia sites with HTTPS
The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to announce that we are implementing HTTPS to encrypt all traffic on Wikimedia sites. With this change, nearly half a billion monthly visitors on Wikipedia and its sister projects will be able to share in the world’s knowledge more securely.
Who links to Wikipedia?
To learn more about who links to Wikipedia, University of Sheffield researchers analyzed the structure of links that point to Wikipedia pages from external websites. Here's what they found. (...)
How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast
The creator of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, wanted to make it fast and easy to edit web pages. Cunningham named his software after a Hawaiian word for “quick.” That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation is happy to report that editing Wikipedia is now twice as quick. Over the last six months we deployed a new technology that speeds up MediaWiki, Wikipedia’s underlying PHP-based code. HipHop Virtual Machine, or HHVM, reduces [...]