How old is wikipedia

Getting African librarians to believe in the power of telling the true African story through adding citations and editing articles about Africans was amazing. It was a call to action for librarians to go beyond being disseminators of information to information leaders in their different countries, telling the stories of their communities on a global platform. I knew Wikipedia was important — although I think I only realised how important lately.

The world needs honest and impartial information more than ever before — and Wikipedia is the most powerful, collaborative platform we can write and share that on. With the desire to promote and preserve his mother tongue, the Maithili language, Tulsi helped launch Maithili Wikipedia in He has since authored more than Wikipedia articles in the language.

I realised that there are a lot of ways to contribute to the Wikimedia movement beyond only writing articles. I have been involved in combating vandalism, trolls, and spam. I am also active in Wikimedia outreach events and activities. Continuous learning and being able to share what I have learned makes me happy and eager to continue volunteering. Location: Busselton, Western Australia, Australia. If there is an issue, he tries to fix it.

As a blind Wikipedia user, Graham also helps to advocate for accessibility on the platform and guide other users on best practices.

Wikipedia has made it much easier to find a starting place for information about all sorts of topics. With Wikipedia, we can now have an encyclopedia that we can use on a close-to-equal footing with sighted people. Takashi, a native Japanese speaker, volunteers as a Wikimedia translator. He helps interpret events, translate articles, and more.

Every time you launch the app in Japanese, you are reading his translation. That way, all the knowledge across Wikimedia projects would be available to readers in every language as soon as it is written.

At that time, human translators will no longer be needed. Sherry is on a mission to improve representation on Wikipedia for people of African descent. She is also motivated by a sense of community.

So, during the pandemic in , Sherry planned a hour virtual event in which Wikimedia volunteers around the world uploaded pictures and shared updates that represented their experiences in the unique time.

Connection had become ever more valuable, and I felt it could be therapeutic. We edited about the pandemic, shared our experiences in our own languages, and left messages of encouragement for one another.

Muzammiluddin, who goes by Muzammil, is a living historian of the Wikimedia movement. For more than half a decade, he has highlighted the work of fellow volunteers through countless interviews and blog posts.

An accomplished Wikipedia editor and community organizer himself, Muzammil has participated in conferences, established a growing volunteer community in India, and made more than , edits across Wikimedia projects. Although people from all walks of life use Wikipedia for knowledge and information, many are either unaware or unmindful of the fact that they too can help in creating or expanding the content in their area of interest and in their own language.

Bobby speaks five languages fluently. It is a skill he puts to use regularly in editing several language versions of Wikipedia, with a focus on promoting smaller languages such as Swati. In addition to editing, Bobby also supports community engagement activities, which includes sharing input on a new Universal Code of Conduct for all Wikimedia projects. The strength of Wikimedia lies in its ability to crowdsource content and its quest to share that content freely.

I think this has made a huge impact on the world. Rosie has created 5, new articles on Wikipedia, an activity that she says is her great passion in life. Before he was forced to flee Venezuela, photographer Wilfredo risked his safety on several occasions to take and share photos of his home country.

In total, he has uploaded more than 46, images to Wikimedia Commons, a free online media repository. And, unlike many other contributors, he releases most of his photos into the public domain, giving up the right to be credited when his work is shared.

I always thought that what I was trying to show was more important than my life, because what I was doing was going to remain for future generations. In the wake of the Arab Spring, Emna was startled by the lack of information available about the history of her home country, Tunisia. She saw an opportunity to close the content gap with Wikipedia. Since then, there is not much Emna has not done in the Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedian of the Year organizes workshops; recruits new volunteers; and edits articles on women, African people and culture, and human rights topics.

Wikipedia is for everyone to read and edit. Many people use it as an informative website, if they spot a mistake while reading it, I hope they edit it instead of ignoring it.

From there, she began training other new contributors and hosting workshops in partnership with universities and cultural institutions. Wikipedia helps the world to be more free and educated. I want people to know that doing little things on the website can culminate in a great impact on other people. There, he proofreads documents and uploads freely-licensed books.

This daunting task was made even more challenging because all of the text was handwritten. Inclusionists are the opposite. Most dedicated editors, whether deletionist or inclusionist, are that category of person who sits somewhere between expert and amateur: the enthusiast. Think of a railfan or a trainspotter. Wikipedians disagree on which is the better term.

Their knowledge of trains is quite different from an engineer's or a railway historian's; you can't major in trainspotting or become credentialed as a railfan. But these people are a legitimate kind of expert nonetheless. Previously, their folk knowledge was reposited in online forums, radio shows, and specialist magazines. Wikipedia harnessed it for the first time. The entry on the famous locomotive the Flying Scotsman is 4, words long and includes eye-wateringly detailed information on its renumbering, series of owners, smoke deflectors, and restoration, from contributors who seem to have the most intimate, hard-won knowledge of the train's working.

Pedantry this powerful is itself a kind of engine, and it is fueled by an enthusiasm that verges on love. Many early critiques of computer-assisted reference works feared a vital human quality would be stripped out in favor of bland fact-speak. But while accuracy binds the trust between reader and contributor, eccentricity and elegance and surprise are the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction.

And they are not qualities we associate with committees. Pedants have a reputation for humorlessness, but for Wikipedians a sense of humor is at the core of the good-faith collaboration that defines the project. It is prone to vandalism by fire, and the article centers around an exacting timeline that lists the date of destruction, the method of destruction, and the new security measures put in place every year since Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay?

Because they don't experience them as labor. This is why the meta side of Wikipedia—the Talk pages, the essay commentaries, the policies—is suffused with nerdy jokes. But expressing the directive that way carries a purpose. Few architects of a world encyclopedia would think to include a forum for jokes, and in the unlikely event that they did, no one could anticipate that it would be important. But on Wikipedia the jokes are very important.

They defuse tensions. They foster joyful cooperation. They encourage humility. They promote further reading and further editing. They also represent a surprise return to the earliest days of Enlightenment reference works. If it is a mistake to keep comparing Wikipedia to Britannica , it is another kind of category error to judge Wikipedia against its peers in the internet's top Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere.

It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs. At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire.

The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. Wikipedia's liberal content licenses and vast information hoard have allowed developers to train neural networks much more quickly, cheaply, and widely than proprietary data sets ever could have.

He was enthralled with the online encyclopedia's content but felt frustrated that users could not ask it questions that required drawing on knowledge from multiple entries across the site. If there were some way to tag women and mayors and cities by population size, then a correctly coded query could return the 20 largest cities with a female mayor automatically.

Instead, he chose numerical codes. Any reference to the book Treasure Island might be tagged with the code Q, for example, or the color brown with Q But of the 80 million items that have been added to Wikidata so far, around half have been entered by human volunteers, a level of crowdsourcing that has surprised even Wikidata's creators.

Editing Wikidata and editing Wikipedia, it turns out, are different enough that they don't cannibalize the same contributors. Wikipedia attracts people interested in writing prose, and Wikidata compels dot-connectors, puzzle-solvers, and completionists. Its product manager, Lydia Pintscher, still comes home from a movie and manually copies the cast list from IMDb into Wikidata with the appropriate tags.

As platforms like Google and Alexa work to provide instant answers to random questions, Wikidata will be one of the key architectures that link the world's information together.

There are subprojects aiming to itemize every sitting politician on earth, every painting in every public collection worldwide, and every gene in the human genome into searchable, adaptable, and machine-readable form. The jokes will still be there. Consider Wikidata's numerical tag for the author Douglas Adams, Q That wink of self-awareness—at the folly and joy of building something as preposterous and powerful as a world brain—is why, with Wikipedia, you know you are getting the best possible information.

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